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Google takes you inside Anne Frank's childhood home with Street View
June 12th is the 90th birthday of Anne Frank, and to mark the occasion, Google is letting you step inside the childhood home of the diarist. A virtual exhibit in the Arts & Culture app and website takes you inside Merwedeplein 37-2 in Amsterdam. You can also explore the space through an indoor version of Street View. All the 1930s-styled rooms of the home, which is now a temporary home and work space for refugee writers that's closed to the public, are viewable.
Virgin Galactic donates SpaceShipTwo rocket motor to the Smithsonian
You might see a piece of private spaceflight history on display when you visit Washington, DC in the future. Virgin Galactic has donated SpaceShipTwo's (VSS Unity) historic rocket motor to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. This is the powerplant that took the craft into space for the first time this past December, and represents both "technical achievement" as well as proof of what you can do through "entrepreneurial innovation," according to museum director Ellen Stofan.
'David Bowie Is' AR exhibit puts Ziggy Stardust on your phone
Sony Music has a fitting tribute for David Bowie on what would have been his 72nd birthday: its promised virtual museum exhibit dedicated to the music legend. David Bowie Is has launched for both Android and iOS, giving you an augmented reality tour of memorabilia that previously required a lengthy physical visit. You'll see famous costumes, photos, handwritten notes and videos, including items that were either limited to the Brooklyn Museum appearance or are exclusive to the app. You can see documents and props from the Blackstar era, watch live performances and glimpse at footage from the experimental DIamond Dogs movie.
'David Bowie Is' coming to your home through AR and VR
Did you miss your chance to see the David Bowie is museum exhibition and pay tribute to the late, great musician? You won't have to wallow in regret for very long. The David Bowie Archive, Sony Music, Planeta and the Victoria and Albert Museum have announced plans for both augmented and virtual reality 'recreations' of the exhibit. These digital productions will use a series of "audio-visual spaces" to showcase 3D scans of Bowie's artifacts and let you get much closer than you might in real life. You might not only see a legendary costume, but try it on for yourself.
The New York Times brings Bowie exhibit to your phone with AR
Now that Google has released its first take on an Android augmented reality framework, ARCore 1.0, quite a few AR apps are taking advantage of it. The New York Times, who has already released an AR experience around Olympic athletes for iOS, is now launching a new AR feature that focuses on David Bowie's "visual legacy." This is also one of the few AR experiences that supports both ARKit and ARCore, making it available on both iOS and Android.
David Byrne opens a neuroscience-themed art exhibit
David Byrne is no stranger to making odd, tech-infused art exhibits, but he's kicking things up a notch. The legendary musician and technologist Mala Gaonkar have launched Neurosociety, a science-themed exhibit at the Pace Art + Technology gallery in Silicon Valley's Menlo Park. The installation, which draws on the work of 15 cognitive neuroscience labs, guides you through four interactive rooms that each reveal a "surprising aspect" of you and your connections to others. Appropriately enough for the Talking Heads singer, it's a serious mind trip: you'll do everything from predicting real elections to seeing yourself represented in a doll's body. Your choices will even contribute to research data for the labs in question.
With Kinect, I made a Grimes remix just by moving my hands
When it comes to electronic music, it's easy to see the ties between art and technology. In fact, that's pretty much the entire goal of Moogfest, a music festival that celebrates more than just its synthesizer roots. At this year's event, Microsoft teamed up with Moogfest to create an interactive installation that allows attendees to remix Grimes' "Realiti" by pushing on a mesh panel. Kinect cameras track a person's hand gestures to control different parts of the song.
Ai Weiwei's recent London art exhibit is available in VR
If you missed Ai Weiwei's recent exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, don't fret. The work of the filmmaker, photographer and sculptor is available online in 360-degree video. An internet-based exhibition includes all of the imagery, video and audio needed to navigate through Weiwei's recently-displayed catalog.
Interactive exhibit honors women in game development
There's a new interactive video game exhibit at The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) in California, and it's not showing off just any game-related material. No, it's putting a spotlight on the accomplishments female game developers -- eight women who worked on influential titles, in particular. Those include Roberta Williams (King's Quest), Yoko Shimomura (Street Fighter III) and Kim Swift (Portal). According to the museum's announcement, the exhibit aims to raise awareness about women's contributions to the industry, as they can be easy to overlook in a male-dominated field. "Women are not some oddity in the video game industry," MADE founder Alex Handy told Kill Screen. "We hope this exhibit helps to highlight that fact for the next generation of game developers." The exhibit has been open since the 12th and will run throughout the summer.
London Science Museum catalogs 200 years of communication tech
Her Majesty the Queen took to Twitter for the first time today, but not to complain about the amount of ice in her post-brunch frappé. Instead, Liz was announcing the opening of a new permanent gallery at London's Science Museum that takes visitors on a journey through more than two centuries of information and communication technologies. "Information Age: Six Networks That Changed Our World" delves into the history of electric telegraphy, telephone and broadcast networks, as well as exploring the later development of satellite communications, mobile networks and the web: all the technology we take for granted today. Among over 800 exhibits are gems including Sir Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT computer, which hosted the first web server, the BBC's first radio transmitter, a piece of the first transatlantic cable connecting the UK to the US, and a replica of the first computer mouse. Taking pride of place at the heart of the gallery is the Rugby Tuning Coil (pictured above), a vast contraption that, in its day, was the most powerful radio transmitter in the world.
New exhibit showcases art in the digital surveillance era
It's safe to say that surveillance technology had a profound effect on American culture, even before Edward Snowden's leaks arrived -- there's a sense that you can never really escape the government's eye. If you've ever shared that feeling, you'll be glad to hear that there's finally an art exhibition devoted to exploring high-tech monitoring. The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art's newly opened Covert Operations is full of projects that not only protest data collection, but sometimes use it to drive their points home. Jenny Holzer's Ribs (above) streams real US government documents on its LED displays. Hasan Elahi's Tracking Transience, meanwhile, uses selections from an online collection of 70,000-plus photos and location info as a sort of challenge; he wants you to mimic an FBI agent trying to piece together his life. If you're interested in seeing any of these projects first-hand, you'll want to swing by the Arizona-based museum no later than January 11th. [Image credit: Richard-Max Tremblay / Jenny Holzer]
Newly launched Smithsonian X 3D Collection offers historical models you can print at home
We've already seen first-hand that the Smithsonian has a keen interest in 3D printing and modelling, and it's now turned that interest into something of a public service with a new online collection that's just launched today. Dubbed Smithsonian X 3D, the collection not only includes a browser-based 3D viewer that lets you get up close with the objects it's already scanned -- everything from fossils to historical artifacts like the Wright Flyer -- but also lets users download the necessary files to print an actual model on your own 3D printer at home. That's all coinciding with a two-day conference of the same name that's started today, and is also being webcast on Ustream. You can start exploring the options available at the source link below.
De Young Museum exhibit highlights the iPad art of David Hockney
"Yosemite I, October 16th 2011" (Credit: David Hockney) British painter and photographer David Hockney caught on to the ability to use iPhones and iPads to create art years ago; in fact, in 2009 we covered a story on how Hockney was making small paintings on the iPhone as gifts for friends. Now the influential artist is going big, painting on the iPad and printing out the works an a larger scale for an exhibit at San Francisco's De Young Museum. The iPad paintings are part of a series called "Bigger Yosemite" and part of a larger Hockney exhibition at the museum. Some of the paintings have been printed out on a huge scale, with some of the works of Yosemite National Park measuring nine feet wide and 12 feet high. The 76-year-old Hockney started making paintings on the iPhone in 2009 with the Brushes app, and jumped to the iPad when it arrived in 2010. Hockney loves the portability of Apple's devices as a digital sketchbook, and used the devices on two trips to Yosemite to create the paintings that make up "Bigger Yosemite." At a 2010 Paris exhibit of his digital paintings of plants and flowers, Hockney remarked that "sometimes I get so carried away, I wipe my fingers at the end thinking that I've got paint on them." The De Young Museum exhibit includes 17 paintings made on an iPad and printed out, as well as 147 other digital works on seven LED displays. "David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition" runs through January 20, 2014.
Photoshop 1.0 source code now available from the Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. (home of Google, and just a few miles from Apple's HQ in Cupertino) has a new display up, featuring none other than the source code to Photoshop 1.0, the very first version of Adobe's powerhouse photo-editing software. The exhibit features 128,000 lines of code, which make up the initial release of Photoshop, for Mac computers back in ye old early computer days of 1989. Photoshop represents one of the very first, and most successful graphical interfaces, which of course the Mac platform is known for innovating. You can not only see the exhibit at the Computer History Museum itself, but you can also download the source code on your own over the Internet -- as long as you agree to a 1,400-word license. At any rate, it's nice to have this little piece of GUI history archived and remembered in this way.
The Art of Blizzard prepares for debut
Blizzard has never been short on absolutely amazing artists, which is why we're quite keen on getting a glimpse of the new Art of Blizzard book coming out this month. The Art of Blizzard is a huge 350-page coffee table book full of hundreds of pieces of concept art and behind-the-scenes looks from the studio's entire library. To celebrate the book's launch, Blizzard invites fans to travel to southern California for a reception and exhibition at Gallery Nucleus. The reception is on January 12th with the exhibition running until February 3rd, and players may be able to snag one of the early copies of the book there as long as supplies last. The studio is sending several of its artists to the gallery to meet fans and provide autographs.
EVE Online coming to NYC's Museum of Modern Art
New York City's Museum of Modern Art is prepping a new video game exhibit for next year and has selected EVE Online to be one of the first 14 titles included. The sci-fi MMO will join the company of titles like Tetris, Portal, and The Sims starting in March 2013. While attendees will be able to play some of the titles in the gallery, Senior Curator Paola Antonelli said that the staff had to get creative with titles like EVE Online: "To convey their experience, we will work with players and designers to create guided tours of these alternate worlds so the visitor can begin to appreciate the extent and possibilities of the complex gameplay." Antonelli said that all of the selections were chosen "as outstanding examples of interaction design." The museum hopes to expand the exhibit to 40 titles in the near future.
We're live from CEATEC 2012 in Chiba, Japan!
Japan's annual electronics expo is about to kick off in the Tokyo suburb of Chiba, and we've settled down for the week to deliver a peek inside Makuhari Messe, where local carriers will demonstrate their R&D wares, a fair share of robots are expected make their debut and component manufacturers will provide a hint of what's to come. And, because the Tokyo Motor Show is held only once every two years, that winter exhibition will make a smaller appearance within these Chiba halls, with vehicle designers showing off their latest contributions to the automotive industry. The fun begins in just a few minutes, when dozens of diligent guards will lift the gates to the show. As always, you can follow along from home without spending a single yen. Just keep an eye on our homepage, or head over to the CEATEC 2012 tag for a complete roster of this year's show coverage.
Space Shuttle Enterprise ready to go on display, space travel gets its fitting tribute
The Enterprise has been on what we'd call a very leisurely trip around the East coast, but it's finally time for the original Space Shuttle to settle down. As of Thursday, the only way to glimpse the prototype spacecraft will be under an inflatable roof at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. It's a quiet yet noble end for the vehicle, which didn't go on formal missions but set the ground-- sorry, spacework for the Shuttles that came later. If you're interested in seeing more animated forms of the Enterprise's legacy, you can either sit down to watch its namesake TV franchise or follow the private expeditions that owe it a debt of gratitude.
MADE museum delves into early 3D games
The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment will host its first exhibit in Oakland starting December 3. Appropriately for its first foray into a physical exhibition space, the museum is highlighting "The History of Early 3D." That's 3D as in polygons, not glasses. Think Star Fox and Doom.
Visualized: Steve Jobs and his patents, as showcased by the USPTO
The United States Patent and Trademark Office put together something special this month for a new exhibit honoring Steve Jobs and the influence he's had. The row of iPhone-like monoliths you see above is now in the atrium of the agency's offices in Alexandria, Virginia (also home to the National Inventors Hall of Fame and Museum), and they're being used to display the more than 300 patents that have Steve Jobs' name on them -- something the USPTO's David Kappos says provides a "striking example of the importance intellectual property plays in the global marketplace." Those interested in checking it out first hand can do so anytime between now and January 15th, free of charge. [Image courtesy MacRumors]
