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Google uses VR to put you inside a Bruegel painting
The Google Cultural institute has been working for half a decade to make the world's art accessible to everyone (with an internet connection). It's done a decent job of it so far, digitizing thousands of paintings and sculptures from hundreds of museums and galleries across the globe. More recently, it created a 360-degree video to put you inside the orchestra pit of New York's Carnegie Hall. Building on that experiment, it's now used a lot more creativity to produce a similar video for the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium. A video that takes you inside Bruegel's The Fall of the Rebel Angels.
Explore 4,500 British Museum artifacts with Google's help
The British Museum in London holds an array of beautiful and historically significant artifacts including the Rosetta Stone, which helped historians to understand the ancient hieroglyphics used in Egypt. Today, the organisation is teaming up with Google to bring its various collections online as part of the Google Cultural Institute. The search giant has been developing this resource for years by continually visiting and archiving exhibits around the world. With the British Museum, an extra 4,500 objects and artworks are being added to its collection, complete with detailed photos and descriptions.
Google Art Project adds hundreds of 3D sculptures and animal skulls
The Google Art Project already archived thousands of murals, paintings and more for viewing on the web. Not all artifacts are flat, though, but the folks in Mountain View added nearly 300 3D scans so you can examine detailed animal skulls and ornate sculptures from the comfort of your sofa. Flip through new collections from six museums before rotating a skull with your mouse or touchpad to see features from every angle -- like the Helmeted hornbill above from the California Academy of Sciences. If you're not into animal bones, don't fret: There's art, too. Thanks to places like the Dallas Museum of Art and Museo d'Arte Orientale, you can ogle sculptures, masks and other ancient artifacts as well. And all without having to get in the car.
Thanks to Google you can now take a virtual stroll through Chinese history
So far we've seen Google's Cultural Institute feature everything from the father of manga to more traditionally historical fare like Bletchley Park. Its latest exhibit hews closer to the latter, with a keen eye toward Chinese history, featuring some 1,400 pieces spread across 48 different exhibitions. The additions range from The Opium War to selections from the Nanyue King Masoleum Museum and a whole lot in between. If you want to really attempt to recreate the walking-around-a-museum experience, there's an option to sort the collections by "museum view," as well. All that history without any of the sore feet? Sign us up.
The 'father of manga' joins Google's Cultural Institute
One of the (if not the) most influential manga artists ever, Osamu Tezuka, has joined the digital halls of the Google Cultural Institute. If there was no Tezuka, there would have probably been no Dragonball, no One Piece... well, you get the picture. The collection includes a Google Street View tour of the museum founded in his honor, as well as a beautifully curated selection of photos, artwork and video clips. It's all been timed to coincide with Atomu's (Astro Boy) birthday, the robot boy that's now 62 years old-- and starred in Japan's first (yes, first) anime. While the collection might not touch the mind-blowing 700 total manga titles the artist completed in his lifetime, it's a mighty well-presented primer.
Explore the ancient temples of Angkor Wat through Google Street View
After touring the canals of Venice and braving the Polar Bear capital of the world, you can now visit the ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia... virtually, that is. The armchair adventurer's best friend, Google Street View, now touts around 90,000 panoramic images of the vast 12th century Khmer wonder. Google took photos of Angkor Wat's glorious temples, sculptures and wall carvings, using both its Street View cars and its 40-pound backpacks called Trekkers, which Hawaii's local government recently used to capture its beaches on film. To make the experience even fuller, Google's also adding 300 exhibits of various Angkor Wat-related artworks to its virtual museum. Obviously, there's nothing quite like admiring the complex's architecture in person, but hey, this could be good enough for folks who can't pack up and travel the world.
Google's Open Gallery lets others create online exhibitions, but is it art?
When Google's not busy fulfilling GIF requests, it also enjoys cataloging arguably more important things for us to vicariously see, read or visit. With so much still so inaccessible, though, today the firm's launched Open Gallery, which allows "anyone with cultural content" to build online exhibitions as part of the Google Cultural Institute. There's still an element of curation, of course, as any individual, gallery, museum et al wanting to populate their own multimedia exhibition needs to hit up Google for an invite. As well as this new online space, an IRL "Lab at the Cultural Institute" has also opened today within the search giant's Parisian office, where new digitization projects will be born and technologies that make them happen tested. To give us an idea of how Open Gallery can be used, there are a bunch of example exhibitions now live (go here), so go take a look after you've bookmarked that disturbing GIF you spent the last 20 minutes finding.
Google offers historical exhibitions, wields its search powers to tell untold stories (video)
Google has been taking advantage of its sheer domination of search to act as a custodian for human culture, whether it's famous artwork or wonders of the world. The most direct example of this archival impulse may have arrived today through the launch of historical exhibitions at the (virtual-only) Google Cultural Institute. Starting with 42 exhibitions, the project delves into major historical events with both a guided, mixed-media tour as well as the kind of free-form exploration you'd expect from Google, such as hunting down a specific person, place or time range. The focus helps Google tell both textbook-level history as well as private stories. Though small at present, the collection is taking further submissions that could lead to a much broader internet resource for learning -- an expansion that we can't help but embrace.
