Picasso seen in detail with the new Google’s camera
That it was no longer necessary to go to a museum to “walk” through it’s masterpieces is not exactly new. That you can enjoy and explore those artworks, to the smallest detail, without needing to be in the same physical room, has also ceased to be a limitation. Google has just announced its latest invention, which, to the delight of art lovers, is a powerful high-resolution camera designed to help them appreciate all the details of a work, from a phone or a computer.
Nicknamed ‘Art Camera’, the device has already raised thousands of gigapixels images from famous artworks, now available online. In practical terms, the gigapixel image is obtained from a billion pixels, reaching details often unnoticeable to the human eye.
In fact, from the last 5 years Google Cultural Institute has been working on this provision of detailed pictorial compositions. The problem was, according to Ben John (Google’s engineer), the amount of time, specialized human resources and technical equipment needed to do that. The introduction of ‘Art Camera’ will allow the company to do more and better, reducing the capture time of an entire artwork for 30 minutes.
Equipped with a laser and sonar system that uses high-frequency sound waves to mediate the distance from the artwork, the robot has already captured images from artists like Pissarro, Signac, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Monet.
