Google Collaborated with 17 Art Galleries to Create Art Project

Google collaborated with 17 Art Galleries to create the Art Project to enable Art lovers to stroll through some of the world’s most famous galleries at the click of a mouse. The US internet giant, Google took equipment from the cars which it used to map cities and recorded the galleries so they can be enjoyed by anyone with web access. The three famous museums- Modern Art in New York, London’s National Gallery and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid can be explored by logging on to the site www.googleartproject.com. The virtual gallery boasts of more than 1,000 works that have been photographed including Art by Vincent van Gogh, James McNeill Whistler and Sandro Botticelli. Visitors will be able to look around more than 350 gallery rooms containing work by more than 450 artists. The site also offers an application to build up a virtual private art collection, and super high-resolution pictures which allow enthusiasts to look at works in minute detail.

For the creation of the website Google used cameras from their Street View cars and took them inside for the first time, filming with specially designed trolleys in the galleries to create the 360-degree virtual tours. Each image contains around seven billion pixels and took between four and eight hours to capture. It essentially means that now visitors can see details in pictures that were earlier impossible to view with the naked eye.