Google's new 'Art Camera'
May 19 2016
Video: Google Cultural Institute
Regular readers will know I'm a great fan of the Google Cultural Institute, and in particular its high-resolution photographs of museums and their collections. Now, a new camera is enabling Google to take more photos more quickly:
Simply dubbed the Art Camera, Google’s design — which is supposedly far simpler to use than similar setups — allows museums to easily digitize their collections for preservation. Operators simply point the camera at each edge of the painting and then the camera goes about taking extreme close-ups of the work before sending them to Google’s servers to be transformed into a single gigapixel file and uploaded to the project’s website just hours later. In fact, that aforementioned day-long wait time from years past? It’s been drastically reduced to just 30 minutes for a one-meter by one-meter work.
Google has loaned 20 cameras to museums around the world. More here.
