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Art Project, powered by Google

googleartproject.com

142 pointsUncle_Sam17 comments

As a painter, I am tremendously excited to be able to take a closer look at some of these paintings than I could in their galleries, and to have so many works from so many collections in one place. I'm itching with anticipation to look at each individual brush-stroke. I'm actually giggling with glee.

I love living in the future.

Just what I was thinking! The high-resolution view is great - the texture of the brush strokes really show. Gives a better idea of some of the technique involved.

Hackers, check out the behind-the-scenes video at http://www.googleartproject.com/c/faq which shows the variety of tech used, including both bike-pulled and pushcart-style cameras that draw upon the street view technology.

Same here. I'm the guy at the gallery with my eye a centimeter from the canvas. I envision many happily lost hours inside this.

I wonder what the copyright situation is with these photos of public domain works. I seem to recall that Wikipedia extracted the images from a similar system used by the National Portrait Gallery in the UK and a legal spat ensued.

Crucially, UK copyright law gives you rights in some stuff just because you put effort into it ("sweat of the brow") while US law has a precedent requiring creativity, so a photo of a statue is copyrighted to the photographer, but photograhps of flat objects don't.

Here's Wikipedia's summary of that dispute: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_W...

It looks like the NPG asserts that use of the images is illegal, but isn't willing to sue the Wikimedia Foundation over it, so they're at something of a stalemate with Wikimedia de-facto winning (but with no guarantees for other parties who aren't Wikimedia). Wikimedia's official position seems to be more or less an ultimatum of, "these are public domain, sue us if you think we're wrong": http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD...

If you look at the "behind the scenes" video, you'll see they are also trying to photograph sculptures by panning around them in 3D. You can't see any of them on the site though.

Do you think they will be able to make navigatable models of sculptures too? This would be exciting.

Naturally, the first thing I did was search for The Art Institute of Chicago.

Defeated, I found "Evening, Honfleur" in the Museum of Modern Art. It wasn't quite the same, but my inner dork was satisfied. ;)

Oh, I thought interface was pretty difficult to navigate until I learned that I could use typical 'game controls' like arrow keys or a,s,w,d to navigate!

Just like in Streetview, indeed this is streetview with added detail images but for art galleries.

Quite awesome.

This is a tremendous help for art history students who can not easily access some of the most praised works of art in the world. Seeing a work of art in a museum creates a transformational experience that can not be replicated on the page of a text-book.

Thank you for posting this. I was busy this weekend sketching out the beginnings of something similar and cataloging which museums where nearby which I could entice with "my" idea. Time to change direction.

I don't understand..(?) There is only one piece of art on this website: A black text on white background that says "Error: Server Error"

Is that the "Art of the App Engine"?

It's a contemporary, deconstructionist, accessible, self-referential, stark, self-explanatory work, addressing the fleeting nature of digital ephemera across huge, seemingly permanent structures like the Internet and Google.

I like it. :-)

I like how you can now go into the gallery using streetview http://goo.gl/maps/KAVo

I love it. People who never had a chance to visit those museums can now see them

Flash only? After google's stance on h.264, this is quite surprising.

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