Google Takes Street View Inside 17 Museums for Virtual Tours
Baku, February 3 (AZERTAC). The Internet giant is partnering with 17 great museums to offer virtual tours that let users see the works up close—really close. Blake Gopnik takes a stroll and wonders whether the technology will overpower the art.
Museums can offer one thing no one else can: intimate, in-person encounters with great works of art, no bells or whistles necessary.
This morning, Google and 17 great museums are trumpeting a new initiative, The Art Project, that is all bells and whistles, but ones that are so impressive they could pass for an orchestra. That means there`s some risk they`ll drown out the art.
The Art Project takes Google Maps` Street View technology and brings it indoors. Instead of exploring a cityscape, the project lets you take a virtual stroll through rooms in great museums. Instead of zooming in on a dry cleaner or restaurant, you zoom in on fine paintings and sculptures. Sometimes, you can keep zooming until you`re at a sub-brushstroke level.
None of this is all that new: Museums, including some in this project, have offered virtual tours and clickable enlargements for more than a decade. What Google has done, at its own expense, is made the user experience more seamless and elegant than ever before.
With van Gogh`s iconic Starry Night, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you can now zoom in, and in, and in, until you see the track of each hair in the painter`s brush as it moves the paint across his canvas; cracks in the paint`s surface start looking like canyons.
Each of the 17 museums in the project has provided one work recorded by Google at this “gigapixel” level, but also many others, more than 1,000 so far, at a more standard high resolution. These still let you drill down to see a single eye in a portrait or a grape in a still life. The museums also provide information, mostly in nothing more than wall-label depth, about the works on virtual view.
MoMA, like some other museums, was relatively modest in its contribution to the project: Its virtual tour only covers two rooms.
The Uffizi in Florence, the world`s finest storehouse of Renaissance art, has made dozens of its galleries available to Google`s Street View technicians; they guide a proprietary camera rig through each room. The Uffizi`s gigapixel image is Botticelli`s famous Birth of Venus, now to be explored more intimately than might once have seemed proper.
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