New Google tech makes gigapixel virtual art museum

Going to a real museum is so 2010. The project by Google dedicated to putting a bit of culture in your day just got a big boost from new technology.

Using laser and sonar to exactly adjust focus, a robotic arm with a camera attached takes hundreds of closeup images of a single piece of art. These images are then sent to Google to be stitched together into a single image, which is then put on display in the Google virtual museum.

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J.M.W. Turner and Walter Fawkes at Farnley Hall

The Google Cultural Institute has been online for about five years, but only managed to get up about 200 images. The new technology will allow a 1m*1m piece of art to be photographed and stitched in about half an hour, as opposed to most of a day with the previous system.

How many pixels in a gigapixel

The resulting images are a gigapixel big (109), that’s 1000*1mp, or 1 billion pixels.

The new camera’s name? Aptly– ‘Art Camera’. Check the images out and get culturefied at the Google Cultural Institute.

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