Explore World Museums Online Using Google Art Project

Google collaborates with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums for the Google Art Project, to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.

You will find a selection of super high-resolution images of famous works of art as well as more than a thousand other images, by more than 400 artists—all in one place. And with Street View technology, you can take a virtual tour inside 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums.

You can explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.

Google Art Project will be available at www.googleartproject.com.

• Explore museums with Street View technology:
  • You can virtually move around the museum’s galleries
  • Select works of art that interest you
  • Navigate though interactive floor plans
  • Learn more about the museum
• Artwork View:
  • Discover featured artworks at high resolution and use the custom viewer to zoom into paintings.
  • Expanding the info panel allows you to read more about an artwork
  • Find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos
• Create your own collection:
  • ‘Create an Artwork Collection’ feature allows you to save specific views of any of the 1000+ artworks and build your own personalised collection
  • Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends and family

User will be provided with 2 options at the home page – View Artwork and Explore the Museum.

Once you click View Artwork link, you can view the entire artwork of the particular museum. Instead if you are clicking Explore the Museum link, you can view the inside view of the entire museum and you can turn right, left, or even you can zoom in or zoom out the artwork displayed on the museum wall.

Once you sign in to Google Art Project using your Gogle account, you can save and collect views of your favourite artworks, add comments to specific zoom levels and then share your personalised collection.

Some of the paintings and features captured with Street View were required to be blurred by the museums for reasons pertaining to copyrights. The high resolution imagery of artworks featured on the art project site are owned by the museums, and these images are protected by copyright laws around the world. The Street View imagery is owned by Google. All of the imagery on this site is provided for the sole purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the art project site.

As of now the following museums are included in the project:

• [advt]Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin – Germany
• Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC – USA
• The Frick Collection, NYC – USA
• Gemäldegalerie, Berlin – Germany
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC – USA
• MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC – USA
• Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid – Spain
• Museo Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid – Spain
• Museum Kampa, Prague – Czech Republic
• National Gallery, London – UK
• Palace of Versailles – France
• Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands
• The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg – Russia
• State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow – Russia
• Tate Britain, London – UK
• Uffizi Gallery, Florence – Italy
• Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands

Art Project – Behind the Scenes

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYXdEUB0VgQ

Art Project – Visitor Guide

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GThNZH5Q1yY

How it Works?

• Dive into brushstroke-level detail: On top of the 1,000+ other images, each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or “gigapixel” photo-capturing technology. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that is around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera—and a specially-built “microscope view” uses Picasa to deliver these images at amazingly high resolution. You can zoom in to see Van Gogh’s famous brushwork or watch how previously hard to-see elements of an artwork suddenly become clear.
• Explore inside the museums: the Street View team designed a brand-new vehicle called the “trolley” to take 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries. These were then stitched together and mapped to their location, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. Google also created a new clickable annotation feature, so you can jump from being inside a museum one moment to viewing a particular artwork the next. Once inside an image, an info panel lets you read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. Gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

Create your own collection: With the “Create an Artwork Collection” feature, you can save specific views of any of the artworks and build your own personalized collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends, family or on the web using the integrated goo.gl URL shortener.