Do you want to visit the world's greatest art museums and take a look at famous masterpieces, but don't have the budget for a world tour? Don't worry, The Art Project by Google can help.
Have you always wanted to visit the New York's Museum of Modern Art, or tour London's Tate Britain or have the urge to stroll through Florence, Italy's Uffizi, but don't want to take time out of your job search or the money out of you budget? Now you can. Google's new Art Project can get you there with just a few clicks of your mouse.
The Art Project takes the idea of street views into the museums themselves to allow users to tour many of the greatest Museums in the world. The new program, which was released earlier this month, gives users the experience of actually walking through any of the 17 participating museums and lets them navigate with street view type controls.
According to a blog post on the Google Blog, the Street View team designed a brand new vehicle, simply called “Trolley”, that they set up to 360-degree images of the interiors of the galleries. After capturing the images, they stitched them together, mapped out their location and enabled smooth navigation of the various rooms in the museums.
Visitors to the Art Project can also choose to zoom in on specific pieces of art and see extremely high levels of detail. The detail is so close, in fact, that each museum selected one piece of art to be photographed using “gigapixel” photo technology. This technology delivers amazingly high resolution and each picture contains around 7 billion pixels. To put it into perspective,a photo taken with gigapixel technology is around 1,000 times more detailed than one taken by a typical digital camera. Additionally, the site offers a special microscope view using Google's Picasa to display the photos.
| Stunning detail on van Gogh's Starry Night |
The whole idea of bringing masterpieces out of the museum and into the living room is commendable. For the average person, the idea of being able to view iconic and historical works of art has always been financially out of reach. It was an experience reserved for wealthy, international travelers or adventurous explorers. With the Art Project, these masterpieces become accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
And while the idea is commendable, the execution has its critics and it certainly has some rough spots to smooth out. For one, not all of the artwork can be displayed in high-quality. The museums selected which works were important enough to be viewed and not all of the rooms in the museums are accessible. Also, the Street View navigation hasn't been fine tuned for indoor use. For example, when you are looking at Street View on the map, the experience is rough and it is easy to over shoot your mark. It doesn't matter so much when you are looking at buildings but when trying to view the inside of a gallery, it can get a bit frustrating.
The Telegraph recently criticized the Art Project for its many flaws. One being that since the museums are deciding which pieces are worthy of being displayed in high resolution, it takes away the ability to chose which paintings to linger at and to discover works that speak to you, even if they aren't the most popular ones in the gallery. They also criticize the project for the lack of participating museums. For now, there are only 17 museums in the Art Project.
Personally, I think that the Art Project is an amazing idea. Although it won't replace the experience of actually standing inside a museum and feeling the art, I feel strongly that great works of art should be accessible to anyone. For too long, masterpieces have been the realm of the rich. But, an idea, a feeling, the emotion of art and the best in human creative expression throughout history belongs to every human being, no matter where the live or how much money they make. It is a part of who we are, as people, as a species, as a culture.
The Art Project is still in its infancy, and I believe that as the bugs are worked out, other museums will want to participate. The navigation controls will get better and more art will be displayed in high definition. For now, I think that Google did the very best it could with the tools and technology it had, and when you are trying to change the world, you have to start somewhere.
What do you think about the Art Project? Let me know in the comments.
By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer for PhillyJobsBlog, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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