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Google's new museum tours bring dinosaurs to life
With Google's help, museums and cultural institutions all over the world have been able to open up their archives to millions of people who wouldn't otherwise get the opportunity to visit. The Art and Culture app combines the best Street View, VR and Photos collections from 1,000 museums, whether they're focusing on famous art pieces or creatures that walked the Earth millions of years ago. Today, the search giant has expanded its collection to include thousands of natural history exhibits, letting you walk (and swim) with dinosaurs and learn more about the worlds that time forgot.
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.
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 brings Bletchley Park to its Cultural Institute (video)
For an unsentimental Silicon Valley giant, Google does have a soft spot for Bletchley Park, the wartime home of Alan Turing and his codebreakers. Having previously donated $850,000 to help restore the site, which now houses the National Museum of Computing, Mountain View has now welcomed pictures and testimony from those who were there to its own online museum, the Google Cultural Institute. There's video after the break, and you can head down to the source links to find out more about the vital work that took place.
