Tag: museum
Google StreetView technology explores museum art treasures up close
Google Art Project means art lovers all over the world can examine famous paintings right down to the brush strokes without leaving home. Combined with photographs taken at a gigapixel resolution, from today Google will be using its StreetView…
Behind the scenes at the British Music Experience
There are condom machines in the toilets of the British Music Experience at the O2 in Greenwich. I’ve no idea why – perhaps they think their visitors will be overwhelmed with emotion after seeing Ziggy Stardust’s ‘Thin White Duke’ outfit, or Dave Hill’s “Superyob” guitar. But in actual fact, it’s gadget fanatics that are likely to be the ones excited, because the BME is one of the most gadget-filled museums in the UK.
Almost everything in the museum is interactive. Your ticket comes equipped with an RFID tag that you wave in front of exhibits that interest you. These are logged in a central database, and after your visit you can go to the BME website and view all the exhibits that you looked at online.
There’s also the option to play along on real instruments with songs you know, or record a video of yourself dancing to one of several famous historical dances. That content will be stored and can also be viewed on the website later on, so you can share your embarrassment with people across the world. You get three free iTunes downloads too, to further investigate music that you don’t know very well.
Although it’s a great and well-connected experience, and anyone remotely interested in popular music since 1945 will find something interesting, there’s an ever so slight sense of a lack of use of the technology to its full effect. The tagging system is great, but it’d be nice to be able to explore extra content from home, rather than just reviewing the content you saw.
It’d also be great if you could do more with your recordings, getting the content out of the website. For copyright reasons, it’s impossible to do anything but stream the recording you make in the ‘Gibson Studio’ section. The British Music experience is technologically ahead of any other museum in London, but it’s still got unrealised potential.
Google pilots artwork in minute detail in Google Earth
The Prado museum in Madrid contain’s some of the art world’s most treasured masterpieces, from El Greco, Rembrandt, Durer, Raphael, Van de Weyden, Tiepolo, Ribera, Fra Angelico and Titian. Google has just presented a collaboration with the museum, to bring the masterpieces to a wider audience.
Users will be able to explore the paintings of the artists above in minute detail – more than 1,400 times clearer than anything the average tourist’s 10-megapixel camera could render, claims the director of Google Spain, Javier Rodriguez Zapatero. The company stitched together over 8,200 “mega-high-resolution” photos digitally.
One of the museum’s most popular paintings, Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, is included, and you’ll be pleased to hear that it’s very easy indeed to zoom in on the naughty bits. To see the digital reproductions for yourself, download the Google Earth program, activate three-dimensional view and click on Prado Museum.
(via the Independent)
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