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Google Art Project Brings Galleries To Your PC
Zothecula writes "Google has announced a collaboration with 17 of the world's most acclaimed art museums that lets people view over 1,000 high res-artwork images and 17 gigapixel images while taking a virtual stroll through their galleries using Street View technology. While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person, the Google Art Project could be the next best thing for those without the time and money to pop on a plane and trade elbows with crowds of tourists looking to catch a glimpse of what some of the best museums have on offer."
Only rich people can afford to get airplane tickets, book a hotel room for a few days oversea and skip work just to go see some paintings.
And don't give me crap about where I live. Half of the families in Canada earn less than 15$K per year, and that's with the 1 Canadian dollar = 1.01204 U.S. dollars
of today.
While nothing can beat seeing a work of art in person....
I disagree wholeheartedly here. If Google, or someone else, can, one day, download the world's most famous art projects directly into my visual, auditory, olfactory, and other sensory lobes in my brain, that would beat the hell out of traveling through the meatspace to see a piece of art in person. I know we're not there yet, but we're chugging forward baby steps at a time. So yeah, nostalgia and all that says that a visit to The Louvre is a life-changing experience, blah blah blah.
But frankly, I don't have the time or patience to deal with the hordes of gawking art patrons at a museum. So yeah, Google, keep up the work (along with everyone else bringing information to the masses). One day, when I can press a button on my phone, and have my brain light up like it just saw Mona Lisa in person, then I certainly will proclaim that such an experience beats the hell out of actually seeing that painting in person.
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Don't worry, the Google Art Project will be available on Bing soon.
Is Google going to provide links the gift shops at these museums too?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I don't really understand art. I would like to. These museums picked these paintings for a reason, and it goes beyond "they look pretty". (Some of 'em don't.)
I know that art requires context. How do these paintings relate to the culture they were painted in, the other paintings that were made at the same time, the paintings that came before?
I could, presumably, google them, and that would be a nice neutral answer. This is just the first step, and perhaps there's some API that will allow curators to include the high-res Google images in with whatever technique they use to provide context. Every museum is different, of course, and some will simply want to ignore the distractions while others would like a guided tour.
But on it's own, the technical feat of producing these images intrigues me as an engineer, but the paintings themselves are just fodder for screen wallpaper. I don't want to be a philistine, but somebody will have to help me out here.
This is very cool tech. I went to the Uffizi and zoomed in on Venus' boob until it filled the screen. Then I noticed all the brush work on the (strategically placed) hand and saw how Botticelli had subtly shifted the placement of the fingers as he painted. Would be very cool if they could add an X-Ray overlay.
Thanks a lot Google - I went looking for 15th-Century nudie picks but instead I ended up learning something.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Having seen several works by the major impressionists in person, I can say that no 2D rendering of a truly great painting can do it justice, no matter how high the resolution. Looking at a Van Gogh, for example, the paint depth in the brush strokes can be up to a centimeter thick, and this depth interactes with the light in person in a way that you can't capture in a 2D image. Which is not to say the whole thing isn't still really cool.
Keep passing the open windows...
Sometimes not even that. I wish I could say that all those sculptures and paintings of naked women were purely for aesthetic appreciation of the human body, but that really wasn't the case. Outside of church frescoes, most paintings fall into one of the categories of immortalizing oneself (portraits) or essentially softcore porn. All that was different is essentially the social contract that it's ok to look at naked women if you pretend it's a representation of Venus ;)
The age of masturbating another part of your body, as you aptly put it, only came much later and is largely a recent phenomenon.
Kinda puts it in perspective, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if, assuming one could get cryogenically frozen until the year 3000 like in Futurama, in a future museum one would hear the guide going, "And to the left we have Larry Flint's unnamed recently-discovered masterpiece, which we tentatively call 'Venus with still life up the ass'" ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Funny enough I submitted this very idea to google about a year ago. I submitted it as a project improvement since its damn near impossible to find an idea submission avenue. I got the idea after using Google street view to take a virtual tour of the Pompeii ruins (I highly recommend checking them out, super cool). So, I sent in a suggestion that they could do something similar with museums around the world, thus allowing people to visit exhibits they may never get to see face to face. I wonder if my submission helped spur on the idea? I never got any kind of response. I'm not really worried about money, I'd just like to know if my suggestion actually gained traction, or if there were a ton of other submissions or what. I can't wait to see how far they take it. I'd love to see it extended to other places. Super cool :)