Google Arts & Culture (formerly Google Art Project) is an online platform of high-resolution images and videos of artworks and cultural artifacts from partner cultural organizations throughout the world, operated by Google.
It utilizes high-resolution image technology that enables the viewer to tour partner organization collections and galleries and explore the artworks' physical and contextual information. The platform includes advanced search capabilities and educational tools.
Features (first version) Virtual Gallery Tour Through the Virtual Gallery Tour (also known as Gallery View) users can virtually 'walk through' the galleries of each partner cultural organization, using the same controls as Google Street View or by clicking on the gallery's floorplan.
Artwork View From the Gallery View (also known as Microscope View), users can zoom in on a particular artwork to view the picture in greater detail. As of April 2012, over 32,000 high-quality images were available. The Microscope view provides a dynamic image of an artwork and scholarly and contextual information to enhance their understanding of the work. When examining an artwork, users could also access information on the item's physical characteristics (e.g. size, material(s), artist). Additional options were Viewing Notes, History of the Artwork, and Artist Information, which users can easily access from the microscope view interface. Each cultural organization was allowed to include as much material as they wanted to contribute, so the level of information varied.
Create an Artwork Collection Users can compile any number of images from the partner organizations and save specific views of artworks to create a personalized virtual exhibition. Using Google's link abbreviator (Goo.gl), users could share their artwork collection with others through social media and conventional online communication mechanisms. This feature was so successful upon the platform's launch that Google had to dedicate additional servers to support it.
Features (second version)
Explore and Discover In the second launch of the platform, Google updated the platform's search capabilities so that users could more easily and intuitively find artworks. Users could find art by filtering their search with several categories, including artist, museum, type of work, date and country. The search results were displayed in a slideshow format. This new function enabled site users to more easily search across numerous collections.
Video and Audio Content Several partner cultural organizations opted to include guided tours or welcome videos of their galleries. This provided users the option to virtually walk through a museum and listen to an audio guide for certain artworks, or to follow a video tour that guided them through a gallery. For example, Michelle Obama filmed a welcome video for the White House gallery page, and Israel's Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem launched a YouTube channel with 400 hours of original video footage from the trial of Adolf Eichmann which users could access through the museum's Arts & Culture exhibits. There is a project created by David Li featuring a bird playing cello. Users can control the bird's cello bow with their computer mouse. Several classical compositions are available to play in sync with visual cues and accompaniment strings.
Education Google Arts & Culture includes several educational tools and resources for teachers and students, such as educational videos, art history timelines, art toolkits, and comparative teaching resources. Two features, called "Look Like an Expert" and "DIY", provide activities similar to those often found in art galleries. For example, one quiz asks site visitors to match a painting to a particular style; another asks visitors to find a symbol within a specified painting that represents a provided story.
Art Selfie Google Arts & Culture allows people to find their fine art likeness by snapping a selfie. The app matches the user's face to old art museum portraits from Google's database. The app topped the download charts in January 2018. The feature was initially created by Cyril Diagne.
Development
The platform emerged as a result of Google's "20-percent time" policy, by which employees were encouraged to spend 20% of their time working on an innovative project of interest. A small team of employees created the concept for the platform after a discussion on how to use the firm's technology to make museum' artwork more accessible. The platform concept fit the firm's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Accordingly, in mid-2009, Google executives agreed to support the project, and they engaged online curators of numerous museums to commit to the initiative.
The platform was launched on February 1, 2011, by the Google Cultural Institute with contributions from international museums, including the Tate Gallery, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York City; and the Uffizi, Florence. On April 3, 2012, Google announced a major expansion, with more than 34,000 artworks from 151 museums and arts organizations from 40 countries, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the White House, the Australian Rock Art Gallery at Griffith University, the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.
Technology used
The team leveraged existing technologies, including Google Street View and Picasa, and built new tools specifically for the platform.
They created an indoor-version of the camera system to capture gallery images by pushing the camera 'trolley' through a museum. It also used professional panoramic heads Clauss RODEON VR Head Hd And Clauss VR Head ST to take high-resolution photos of the artworks within a gallery. This technology allowed excellent attention to detail and the highest image resolution. Each partner museum selected one artwork to be captured at ultra-high resolution with approximately 1,000 times more detail than the average digital camera. The largest image, Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov's The Apparition of Christ to the People, is over 12 gigapixels. To maximize image quality, the team coordinated with partner museums' lighting technicians and photography teams. For example, at Tate Britain, they collaborated to capture a gigapixel image of No Woman No Cry in both natural light and in the dark. Tate suggested this method to capture the painting's hidden phosphorescent image, which glows in the dark. The Google camera team had to adapt their method and keep the camera shutter open for 8 seconds in the dark to capture a distinct enough image. Now, unlike at Tate, from the site, one can view the painting in both light settings.
Once the images were captured, the team used Google Street View software and GPS data to seamlessly stitch the images and connect them to museum floor plans. Each image was mapped according to longitude and latitude, so that users can seamlessly transition to it from Google Maps, looking inside the partner museums' galleries. Street View was also integrated with Picasa, for a seamless transition from gallery view to microscope view.
The user interface lets site visitors virtually 'walk through' galleries with Google Street View, and look at artworks with Picasa, which provides the microscope view to zoom in to images for greater detail than is visible to the naked eye. Additionally, the microscope view of artworks incorporates other resources—including Google Scholar, Google Docs and YouTube—so users can link to external content to learn more about the work. Finally, the platform incorporates Google's URL compacter (Goo.gl), so that users can save and easily share their personal collections.
The resulting platform is a Java-based Google App Engine Web application, which exists on Google's infrastructure.
Technology limitations
Luc Vincent, director of engineering at Google and head of the team responsible for Street View for the platform, expressed concern over the quality of panorama cameras his team used to capture gallery and artwork images. In particular, he believes that improved aperture control would enable more consistent quality of gallery images.
Some artworks were particularly difficult to capture and re-present accurately as virtual, two-dimensional images. For example, Google described the inclusion of Hans Holbein the Younger's The Ambassadors as "tough". This was due to the anamorphic techniques distorting the image of a skull in the foreground of the painting. When looking at the original painting at the National Gallery in London, the depiction of the skull appears distorted until the viewer physically steps to the side of the painting. Once the viewer is looking at the shape from the intended vantage point, the lifelike depiction of the skull materializes. The effect is still apparent in the gigapixel version of the painting but was less pronounced in the "walk-through" function.
As New York Times art reviewer Roberta Smith said: "[Google Arts & Culture] is very much a work in progress, full of bugs and information gaps, and sometimes blurry, careering virtual tours." Though the second-generation platform solved some technological issues, the firm plans to continue developing additional enhancements for the site. Future improvements currently under consideration include: upgrading panorama cameras, more detailed web metrics, and improved searchability through meta-tagging and user-generated meta-tagging. The firm is also considering the addition of an experimental page to the platform, to highlight emerging technologies that artists are using to showcase their works.
Institutions and works Seventeen partner museums were included in the launch of the project. The original 1,061 high-resolution images (by 486 different artists) are shown in 385 virtual gallery rooms, with 6,000 Street View–style panoramas.
List of the initial 17 partner museums Below is a list of the original seventeen partner museums at the time of the platform's launch. All images shown are actual images from Google Arts & Culture: Partner Museum Gigapixel artwork Title Artist Date Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin, Germany In the Conservatory Édouard Manet 1878–1879 Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Washington, DC, US The Princess from the Land of Porcelain James McNeill Whistler 1863–1865 Frick Collection New York, US St Francis in the Desert Giovanni Bellini Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Germany The Merchant Georg Gisze Hans Holbein the Younger 1497–1562 Museum Kampa Prague, Czech Republic The Cathedral (Katedrála) František Kupka 1912–1913 Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, US The Harvesters Pieter Bruegel the Elder 1565 Museum of Modern Art New York, US The Starry Night Vincent van Gogh 1889 Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Spain The Bottle of Anís del Mono Juan Gris 1914 Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum Madrid, Spain Young Knight in a Landscape Vittore Carpaccio 1510 National Gallery London, UK The Ambassadors Hans Holbein the Younger 1533 Palace of Versailles Versailles, France Marie-Antoinette de Lorraine-Habsbourg, Queen of France, and her children Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun 1787 Rijksmuseum Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands Night Watch Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn 1642 State Hermitage Museum St. Petersburg, Russia The Return of the Prodigal Son Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn 1663–1665 State Tretyakov Gallery Moscow, Russia The Appearance of Christ Before the People Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov 1837–1857 Tate Britain London, UK No Woman No Cry Chris Ofili 1998 Uffizi Florence, Italy The Birth of Venus Sandro Botticelli 1483–1485 Capitoline Museums Rome, Italy Capitoline Wolf 500 BC–480 BC Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, Netherlands The Bedroom Vincent van Gogh 1888
On April 3, 2012, Google announced the expansion of the platform to include 151 cultural organizations, with new partners contributing a gigapixel image of one of their works.