Google Art Camera
May 17, 2016 6:35 PM   Subscribe

No brush stroke, no accidental blotch of paint, no hidden nuance of a great painting by van Gogh or Monet can hide from the ultra-high resolution Google Art Camera.
posted by ColdChef (12 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh, I love this!
  • Giant $200 art history textbooks? Buh-bye!
  • My curious child being dragged out of a museum by someone in an ill-fitting blue blazer? Never again!
  • Being stuck at the back of a crowd of camera-waving tourists more pushy than I? No more!
Next stop is a wall-size display for these things that rotates automagically.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:21 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


...And this is what it would show me each morning: Yosemite sunrise!
posted by wenestvedt at 7:24 PM on May 17, 2016


I have been a fan of the Google Cultural Institute since stumbling on it while working my way through The Annotated Mona Lisa (good overview for art noobs, crappy pictures).

If you are running Chrome, you could do worse things for yourself than installing the Google Art Project Chrome extension, which will replace the default "new tab" screen with a piece of art from their scanned collection. I've discovered a number of pieces and artists that I like just from seeing them show up when I login to my computer.
posted by sparklemotion at 8:12 PM on May 17, 2016 [10 favorites]


Do read the comments. Interesting discussion about color accuracy.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:13 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


When you're in a museum and you walk up close enough to see the individual brush strokes, you can still see the rest of the painting in your peripheral vision. Seems like you'd need next-next-gen VR (much higher resolution than the current gear) or a wall-sized monitor for these images to give you a comparable experience.
posted by straight at 10:24 PM on May 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Definitely read the comments, so much more then pixels for reproduction.

From Mir Lada: One problem in the Google samples is micro highlights on the edges of canvas weave or paint texture, reading as worn paint (white spots) which would be eliminated with double polarization,

I can not imagine this being "rolled through" museums and getting anything like a quality image.
posted by sammyo at 4:00 AM on May 18, 2016


oh god this is so f-ing cool. I want to get this through every damn art gallery and museum.


Next stop is a wall-size display for these things that rotates automagically.

Came in to the comments to say the exact same thing!
posted by Theta States at 6:52 AM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Next stop is a wall-size display for these things that rotates automagically.

A display where each retina-pitch pixel is raisable on a tiny pin, so that you can see the texture of the paint in three dimensions (where it is convex to the picture plane, of course, but you can't have everything).
posted by acb at 7:12 AM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


One problem in the Google samples is micro highlights on the edges of canvas weave or paint texture, reading as worn paint (white spots) which would be eliminated with double polarization

I was wondering about those. On several of the paintings I couldn't tell if the bits of white were highlights the painter put in to evoke the light in the scene or actual highlights from whatever source is lighting the painting for the camera.
posted by straight at 8:14 AM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Nnnnnneeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrds!

Doughnut Replicators or Bust
posted by petebest at 9:35 AM on May 18, 2016


I wonder which museums have signed on and which have not? There's quite a few museums that will not be fond of superhigh resolution photos of their big draws being available, I bet. I recall that the project to try to read some of the burnt Herculaneum scrolls without unrolling them stalled because the institutions that had them started to think it might work and suddenly they wouldn't be as important any more. And of course it took *decades* for a facsimile of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be released, because the scholars who controlled access didn't want other people to be able to work (and publish) on them.
posted by tavella at 1:10 PM on May 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Also: in the neoliberal era, those things are all intellectual property, with valuable rights attached, and if you let anybody exploit those rights without appropriate monetisation, you're violating your fiduciary responsibility to your stakeholders.
posted by acb at 4:37 AM on May 19, 2016


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