Google's Gigapixels
Though Google is the world’s leading platform when it comes to search marketing, they’re always looking for more innovative ways to enhance the user experience, and offer something that no other search engine – or indeed, company – can hope to match. Google Art Project is their latest creation.
So what is the Art Project? It's a wonderful piece of web development, where Google have utilised their Street View technology to allow searchers to tour some of the most famous museums on the planet, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery in London and many others.
Visitors will be able to view famous works of art for free. We, for example, have spent the morning looking at incredible works of art such as Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ and Cezanne’s ‘Château Noir’ in incredible detail without leaving the office, saving us considerable flight costs to New York.
The works aren’t just blurry jpeg representations either. Google has gone to the trouble of photographing some of the pictures with gigapixel photo capturing technology, which presents each piece in fascinating super high resolution. Approximately seven billion pixels are in each image taken with this gigapixel technology, and allows people to see every brushstroke in intricate detail, as though you were there yourself.
Many in the art world – and we’re in agreement – believe that art of this calibre should be free for everybody to view and enjoy, and it’s fantastic that Google are trying to do that with their Art Project. It might not have any relevance on the world of search marketing, but we’re immensely impressed with Google’s efforts to bring high-quality art to a wider audience.
There have been some grumblings and groaning in the media that Google Art Project defeats the purpose of going to see art in galleries ‘in real life’. What nonsense. Anything that introduces people to the world of fine art in such an easily-accessible, presentable manner can only be good.
