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Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 3, 2011 at 1:56pm

http://redirectingat.com/?id=9395X680699&xs=1&url=http%3A%2...

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 3, 2011 at 2:35pm

http://www.googleartproject.com/

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 9, 2011 at 7:10am

How this Google art project works--

The art of making Google Art Project (Q&A)

by Daniel Terdiman

Last week, Google unveiled Art Project, an effort to bring works from 17 of the great museums of the world to a global audience.

(Credit: Google)

Last week, Google unveiled a Street View-esque project that brings viewers face to face with some of the greatest art on earth.

Known as Google Art Project, the initiative will give users remote access to the priceless paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts from 17 of the world's most famous museums, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, London's National Gallery and Tate Britain, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and others.

In a blog post announcing the effort, Amit Sood, head of the Google Art Project, explained that users will have initial access to at least 1,000 works from the 17 museums, including one from each institution that will be presented in high-resolution using "'gigapixel' photo-capturing technology."

The project is based, in part, Sood said, on Google's Street View technology.

  (Credit: Schematic)

But Google didn't do this project on its own. Rather, it partnered with a company called Schematic, which helped integrate many of the technologies that together form Google Art Project, and which took on a lot of the heavy lifting in dealing with the various museums. Yesterday, Jason Brush, the executive vice president for user experience at Schematic, sat down for a 45 Minutes on IM interview about the effort, and talked about working with some of the greatest art collections ever put together, about collaborating with Googlers trying to do exciting things with their "20 percent" time, and about the challenges of building a powerful experience around what could be some people's first-ever interaction with some of the most important paintings in history.

Q: Thanks very much for joining me for this. I appreciate it. Maybe you could start by telling me what it felt like to learn you were going to be instrumental in bringing some of the world's greatest art to a global audience?
Jason Brush: First, I was awestruck by the idea itself, which the Googlers with whom we collaborated on the project had invented. It was a project that really reflects the full potential of what the Web can achieve, and is the sort of concept that got me interested in new media to begin with. I could just imagine a child at a public library, somewhere in the world, who might never be able to afford airfare to travel to these museums, and who might not even have access to high-quality reproductions in books, being able to wander the halls of the great museums that the site brings together. It was a real honor to be brought on board by Amit Sood, who led the project at Google.

For a lot of people, this could be their first-ever interaction with some of the world's great art, as you suggested above. How much pressure did you feel to make sure that their experience was a good one?
Brush: I've worked on projects before that were groundbreaking, for which there was a great deal of pressure to get the experience right--the site we built to broadcast the Beijing Olympics online, for example--but this was different. For some reason the pressure on this project was different--I'm sure for everybody involved. Partially, it was because of the restraints. It wasn't just a matter of putting up the artwork and making it accessible. There was also a lot of pressure to make sure that we weren't making any explicit curatorial decisions. An interface can of course say something specific in and of itself, and we worked very hard to make sure that we weren't imposing a point of view on the display of artwork.

Talk a little more about the pressure not to make explicit curatorial decisions. Why not, and how did you resist making decisions like that?
Brush: Well, one of the first issues we had to face was making sure that the site wasn't itself a meta-museum. The museums themselves have the cultural and civic onus to present the artworks in their collections in whatever way that's appropriate to their mission. We didn't want to usurp that. So, the pressure stemmed from not just making sure that the site was enjoyable and easy-to-use because of it's cultural value, but also because we needed to create a model that drew a clear distinction between the live, in-person museum-going experience--which we hope the site will encourage people to have--and the experience you get online. We were in essence creating a whole new model for viewing art, which was a great responsibility.

Tell me a great story about working with these museums?
Brush: At Schematic, we didn't work directly with the museums--the photography of the artworks and the capture of the Street View imagery was coordinated by Google, with the help of some other partners. So, we didn't have much interaction with the museums themselves.

The museums that are involved hadn't worked all together before on this kind of project. What was it like to help coordinate them working?
Brush: This was indeed one of the notable feats of the project--creating a forum that all the many institutions could participate in. This also was handled by the team at Google. So, while we weren't involved in the negotiations, we did make some design decisions vis-a-vis unique aggregation of content from many museums. For instance, on the home page, we chose to randomize which museum gets highlighted on load. We didn't want it always to be the museum at the top of the list.

From your perspective, how much does this collection miss having the Mona Lisa?
Brush: I think you could make the same statement about, say, Picasso's "Guernica," but I don't think that the site as a whole suffers per se from not having certain artworks. it's really up to the museums to decide what they want to make available. I hope the catalog expands, but I don't think that the achievement is diminished at all by the fact that it doesn't house every world famous painting. And of course, some artists' work--James Turrell, Richard Serra, Olafur Eliasson--needs to be experienced in person.

 

Google Art Project: Street View goes to the museum (images)

Talk about the future of the project. I assume, well, I hope, that more museums will be added. What's the story with expansion?
Brush: With expansion, I can't say. I haven't heard anything from Amit Sood, who is really the mastermind behind the project, about what's next.

It seems you had a full grab bag of Google APIs to integrate as part of this project. Did you have some say in which ones were included. And how did you choose which pieces?
Brush: The site indeed makes use of a huge range of Google APIs. The way we evaluated what APIs to use was to first design the experience, and then to see if an API was available that could achieve what we needed. As it happened, we were able to build the site pretty much entirely using publicly available APIs. The two pieces Schematic didn't build were the "microscope" viewer, which allows you to zoom into the artwork, and the customized version of Street View. Both of these were built by the team at Google--"certifiable geniuses" as our tech lead calls them--and then integrated into the UI framework we designed and built. So, as a whole, we were able to use the APIs pretty fluidly.

Can you talk about how the project presents the artworks in both Street View mode and directly--what were some of the issues involved in deciding how to do that?
Brush: This was the trickiest part of the whole site to build. We knew that we needed to load in the separate viewer to zoom into the artwork, and so we created links within Street View that you could click on to load the image viewer. The challenge here was twofold: first, placing the links reliably vis-a-vis the artwork in Street View--we didn't want them overlapping the images--and then knowing which artwork to link them to. In the end, we built a custom tool to map artworks in Street View to their gigapixel counterparts. But much of the mapping had to be done manually, which was quite painstaking.

Also, in normal Street View, head-up displays are normalized. Here, we needed to strike a balance between making the links readable, while avoiding them distracting from the gallery experience. To do this, we built a system to assign different sized links inside a gallery, depending on its decor. More ornate rooms got bigger, bolder icons; minimalist rooms got smaller ones.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20030917-52.html#ixzz1DQYlPipu

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 9, 2011 at 7:17am

How Google Art Project is made possible using technology--   

 

Explore museums and great works of art in the Google Art Project

One of the things I love about working at Google is that you can come up with an idea one day and the next day start getting to work to make it a reality. That's what happened with the Art Project—a new tool we're announcing today which puts more than 1,000 works of art at your fingertips, in extraordinary detail.

It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close.

We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge—like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors! Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for yourself today at www.googleartproject.com.

You’ll 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, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

• 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's that’s 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—such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Merchant Georg Gisze.”

• 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. We 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.

We’re incredibly excited about this project—it’s our first step toward making great art more accessible, and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time. So whether you’re a student, an aspiring artist or a casual museum-goer, we hope the Google Art Project gives you a fun and unusual way to interact with art—and hopefully inspires you to visit the real thing.

Posted by Amit Sood, Head of Google Art Project

Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on February 11, 2011 at 9:12am

The Google Art Project  actually consists of two relatively autonomous parallel initiatives. One involves Google's effort to apply its Street View technology to the 17 participating institutions, which include New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art; London's National Gallery and Tate; and Madrid's Museo Reina Sofia and Thyssen-Bornemisza. This feature is, well, a lot like being able to look at a museum using Google Street View.

The second feature of the GAP is a library of hundreds of zoomable, high-resolution images of paintings (and a few sculptures) from the various participating collections. These you view by clicking a little "+" icon that appears when you mouse over the paintings in Street View, which then switches you over into an entirely separate viewing mode. As Roberta Smith pointed out in her thoughtful exploration of the GAP, online zoomable images are not really so new or novel for museums. But the new standard set by the sheer amount of zoomable surface in the ultra-detailed "gigapixel" renderings of 17 spotlighted paintings — one from each of the participating institutions — is the game-changer here.

It's not just that zooming allows you to pick out details that you would have missed otherwise, though this is definitely true. You can discover the powdery orange dots Manet puts into the irises of the woman populating his "In the Conservatory" (at Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie), or dive into the scaly waves behind Botticelli's "Venus" (from the Uffizi), or even inspect the cracks in the paint that mar Marie Antoinette's perfect face in Vigée-Lebrun's famous Versailles portrait.

At about half of the magnification allowed for by the gigapixel versions, the new intimacy already brings to mind Maurice Denis's proto-modernist maxim that "a picture — before being a war horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort — is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." Even the most detailed realist work rendered at this level of zoom reads as a collection of painterly tricks and feints. You can see, for instance, that the junction where a flower stem passes into the water of a glass vase in Hans Holbein's "Merchant" is far from photographic, suggested by a few ingenious dashed white lines.

But that is at just 50 percent magnification. Continuing to zoom in, you pass through modernist aesthetic self-consciousness and into full postmodern aesthetic disintegration. At total zoom, in effect, you are gazing across the surface not just as the painter himself might have gazed upon it, but actually at a level at which not even the artist himself could have experienced his own work. You don't just look at Whistler's stylish signature up close in the Freer's "Princess from the Land of Porcelain"; you can gaze through it, to the spots of the canvas peeking through beneath. These images aren't just surrogates for the real thing; they actually give you access to more detail than a casual encounter with the real thing might (without the assistance of a good magnifying glass, of course)