If you are an avid art lover or art is just one of your budding interests, then there’s some good news for you. Google, which has altered the universe in many ways, changed your life last week. It unveiled its latest web endeavour, Art Project that offers easy access to some of the art treasures and interiors of 17 of the most prominent museums in the United States and Europe.
With
http://www.googleartproject.com/, Google jumps into the online art arena with tools that will allow web surfers with to look more closely at individual art works, including some that will be digitized so exhaustively that individual brush strokes and hairline cracks in the surface will be visible.
The Features of Google Art Project:
The new program, which permits artworks to be viewed at incredibly high levels of detail, adapts the company's 'street view' technology to indoor environments, visitors can also create, comment on, and share their own virtual art collections compiled from the project's works.
In 'museum view' rooms are navigable using the onscreen arrows, as in google street view, but virtual visitors can also jump to specific artworks from a list of the museum's most renowned works, or explore specific parts of the museum by using a hyperlinked floor plan.
'Artwork view' allows a visitor to zoom into paintings at high resolution. viewing notes on the sidebar offer information about and context for the work, as well as interfaces to learn more about the artist or view his other works in google art project.
Selected artworks have been treated with google's 'gigapixel photo capturing technology', generating extremely high resolution images, allegedly composed of seven billion pixels.
The 'museum view' sidebar also contains a brief history of the museum, links to its website, and a link to the museum's location on google maps.
"Even though a lot of these images are available on museum websites, you cannot really zoom into them with the ease of this website," Amit Sood, leader of the Google Art Project.
Currently, visitors can access 385 gallery rooms, including more than a 1,000 high-resolution images of work by 486 different artists.
Museums listed on “Google Art Project”
1. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
2. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
3. Palace of Versailles, Versailles
4. Tate Britain, London
5. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
6. MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
7. Uffizi Gallery, Florence
8. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
9. National Gallery, London
10.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
11. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington, DC
12. The State Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg
13. The Frick Collection, New York City
14. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
15. Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
16. Museo Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid
17. Museum Kampa, Prague
One of the very good features of this site is that it offers the option to pore over the surface with an adjustable magnifying rectangle. This kind of intimacy is usually granted only to the artist and his assistants, or conservators and preparators.
The Art Project has been hailed as a great leap forward in terms of the online art experience, which seems debatable, since most museums have spent at least the last decade — and quite a bit of money — developing Web access to works in their collections. Still, Google offers a distinct and extraordinary benefit in its United Nations-like gathering of different collections under one technological umbrella, enabling easy online travel among them.
Despite the roster of world-class museums, there are notable omissions: titans like the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Prado in Madrid and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, not to mention most major American museums, starting with the National Gallery in Washington. Without specifying who turned it down, Google says that many museums were approached, of which ...Read the rest of my article at:
http://www.technology-digital.com/industry-focus/technology/google-offers-virtual-grand-tour-artwork
