Google Offers Virtual Tours of 17 of the Top Museums Using Street View Technology
LONDON (REUTERS).- Google aims to bring the world’s great art galleries into the home with a new website that offers virtual tours using Street View technology, the ability to build private collections and ultra-high resolution images.
While most big galleries have been busy making their works accessible online for years, experts told a launch at London’s Tate Britain gallery on Tuesday that Google’s site was looking to take the online art experience to a new level.
“It could be the game changer,” said Julian Raby of the Freer Gallery of Art, part of the Smithsonian in Washington DC, which is one of 17 galleries taking part in the project.
Each of the 17 museums involved also chose one artwork to be photographed using “gigapixel” photo capturing technology, resulting in an image on the computer containing seven billion pixels and providing detail not visible to the naked eye.
And so by zooming in on a broken string on the instrument in Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Ambassadors,” from London’s National Gallery, the viewer not only sees the string clearly but also where each new brushstroke has been applied.
