Virtual art gallery in google. Virtual Museum by Google

Now only the lazy haven't posted the news that Google has unveiled a new version of its Arts & Culture app, which was released in 2016. This program for Android and iOS is a window into the world of art. Google has digitized in high resolution a huge number of paintings and other works of art. As part of this initiative, many articles are published and a map of significant cultural sites is provided. A recent update added a fun feature based on a very complex algorithm. Artificial intelligence from a photograph is able to find a picture in which a person similar to you will be depicted.

The problem is that the feature of finding yourself in the picture only works in the US. To get around this limitation, you need to use a VPN. Turbo VPN for Android is perfect for this. Just select the New York, USA server in the application and connect. Then open the Arts & Culture program and scroll down to the section where you will be asked to find yourself in the picture.

While the user interface is extremely simple, Google uses very sophisticated facial recognition algorithms to compare your features to portraits among the 70,000 works of art in the Google Art Project database.

And look forward to new virtual travels. The weekend is ahead, and I am glad to offer you another great way to spend it with benefit and at the same time improve your cultural level.

Would you like to visit, for example, the Prague Kamp Museum? Or the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam? Or maybe you have not yet been to the Tretyakov Gallery or the Hermitage? Not a question - literally in a couple of minutes all this will become real for you!

You will walk through the halls and see beautiful works of art with your own eyes. Sit back, because now I'm going to tell you about a really amazing online service from Google.

is a truly grandiose project that allows a person, without leaving home, to visit 17 famous museums in such cities as New York, Berlin, Prague, Amsterdam, Moscow, and others at once.

This service has brought together more than a thousand works of art, making them available from anywhere in the world. According to critics, the virtual museum from Google allows you to move to a "qualitatively new level of preservation and transmission of cultural heritage to future generations."

The creators of this virtual museum service have done a lot of hard work. They transferred to the premises of museums the Street View technology they had already tested on the Google Earth project, which allows you to see everything as if you yourself were walking through the halls of the exposition. You can move in all directions, you can move from room to room, you can approach any picture and examine it in the smallest detail.

Opportunities of the virtual museum

Here I would like to stop a little more in detail. The fact is that works of art are shot in the smallest detail: you can see the weakest and most imperceptible strokes of the artist with a brush. Moreover, each museum singled out one painting that was photographed with a resolution of 7,000 megapixels, which is billions of pixels! It seems incredible, but you can really see even the smallest cracks in the canvas! Imagine what a gift this is for special connoisseurs of art!

By pressing the button " i» in the right corner of the virtual museum screen, a panel will open where the following information will be available:

• museum plan
• description of the room where you are now
• information about the painting (title, author, dimensions)
• artist biography
• video about the history of the painting
• interesting historical notes, etc.

For each work of art, you can leave comments, share your impressions, give links to your friends. In general, here you can, opening your mouth in amazement, spend more than one day.

According to Google vice president of engineering Nelson Mattos, Google does not seek to make a full-fledged alternative to visiting museums in reality. On the contrary, with their project they want to push people to this, because after seeing a picture on a monitor screen, a person will definitely want to see it live with their own eyes.

Needless to say, Google knows how to make high-quality, high-demand products of the highest level! The creators of the Google Art Project intend to gradually add more and more museums of the world to their project. Let's wish them good luck in this - after all, they are doing a project that is really significant for humanity.

Video about how the project was created and what work had to be done to implement it (I recommend watching it):

Friends, did you like this service? Share your impressions in the comments.

Google Arts & Culture is a project of Google, a recognized leader in the multimedia technology market, which includes a collection of high-quality images of works of art from famous museums and art galleries around the world. The project makes it possible to take virtual walks through the halls of museums, and high-precision digitization of works of art allows not only to see, but also to examine in detail the masterpieces of world art.

The State Russian Museum in 2012 became one of the first Russian museums to take part in the Google Arts & Culture project along with the Hermitage, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin and the Museum named after N.K. Roerich. The number of participants is growing every year. About 250 partners take part in the project, more than 45,000 works of art are presented, 50 of which are masterpieces from the collection of the Russian Museum.

As part of the Google Arts & Culture project at the Russian Museum, panoramic photography was carried out in 36 halls of the main museum exposition located in the Mikhailovsky Palace, panoramic shooting on the territory of the Summer and Mikhailovsky Gardens, the cour d'honneur of the Mikhailovsky Palace, the courtyard of the Mikhailovsky Castle and Maple Alley. In February 2012, Google employees took a gigapixel photograph of Karl Bryullov's painting The Last Day of Pompeii.

gigapixel image

Google projects are live, developing, they not only open up colossal material for specialists, art lovers all over the world, but also become a platform for talking about the main activities of museums in the popular Google Art Talks project. In 2013, the Russian Museum took part in the Art Talk with the State Russian Museum video meeting. The topic of the meeting was “Computer technologies in the sphere of culture: breaking the virtual field of the painting”.

The conversation was attended by the head and employees of the development department "Russian Museum: Virtual Branch", as well as the heads of the virtual branches of the Russian Museum in the cities of St. Petersburg (St. Petersburg State University) and Turku (People's Finnish-speaking Institute).

Services for searching for doubles by photo have been known for a long time, but Google managed to capitalize on this hype in 2018. The company has added a feature to compare selfies with works of art in the Arts & Culture guide. After that, the application, released back in 2016, topped the top free services in the US App Store. And received dozens of negative reviews due to the lack of Android support and restrictions on use by country.

The Village found out how the neural network works and whether it is possible to “feed” your photo to it while in Russia.

How a neural network works

New service "Is your portrait in a museum?" helps the user to find out if his selfie looks like any of the thousands of works of artists and sculptors from around the world. To do this, Google uses its own facial recognition technology. After analyzing the image, the neural network produces a gallery of works of art, which depict the alleged doubles of the user. All of them are accompanied by a percentage estimate of the accuracy of the match. In addition to selfies, the algorithm can also be “feeded” to any other photo, but not from the gallery, but retaken.

This google arts and culture app is pretty amazing. Feel real strong about my 40% 😳 pic.twitter.com/2iyexRkUG5

Pw (@petewentz) January 14, 2018

Also in social networks you can find paired photos, which were jokingly combined by the users themselves. Google representatives explained that a fake can be identified by the absence of a watermark with the name of the picture or a white stripe between the pictures.

How to use the service in Russia

To open access to this section, you will need to convince Apple that you are located, for example, in the United States. Here's how to do it:

Log out. Go to your iPhone or iPad settings, find "iTunes Store & App Store" and sign out of your current Apple ID.

Turn off geolocation. Go back to the settings and in the item "Privacy" deactivate the location of the gadget.

Change region and language. Go back to the settings again, go to "General", and then to "Language and Region" and select US and English there.

Find an app. Go to the App Store, find the Google Arts & Culture app there, and click Get.

Register a new Apple ID. When you try to install the app, the App Store will prompt you to create a new account. Issue it to an email that has not been used in Apple services before. Enter the United States as your country of residence. The address can be filled in at random - for example, Oakland, 481 51st Street. The state then you need to specify California, the index is 94608, and the phone is, say, 510–201–5760. You should not link a bank card to this account.

Activate the VPN. After downloading Google Arts & Culture, take your time to turn on the app. First, install a VPN service - such as Free VPN - and activate settings in it that mimic you being on the US West Coast.

If the App Store gives you an account lockout warning while installing apps, you'll have to spend some time changing your passwords over and over again. Then Apple will give up.

Launch Google Arts & Culture. If, after launching the application, a banner with a link to the "Is your portrait in a museum?" service does not appear in the "Home" section, experiment with the settings. Try turning on Airplane mode, reactivating location services, or reconnecting your VPN. Changing your account or logging out of it in Google in the main menu of the application can also help.

Google has acquired an interesting function of comparing photos with the creations of famous artists. With its help, you can find out if you look like a character in a painting or sculpture.

The function is based on face recognition technology and a neural network. The latter will provide a range of options and indicate the percentage of similarity. Often the results are surprisingly accurate, but there are also errors.

At the moment, the function is only available in some regions of the United States, however, with the help of, for example, Turbo VPN, anyone can use it. It is important to specify the USA as your location, and not every server is suitable. Of the tested, the function appears only if you connect to New York.

With Android, everything is simple - download the VPN application and connect to the desired server. With iOS, it's more complicated: you need to turn off your current Apple ID, turn off geolocation, change the language to English and the region to the United States, and only then turn on VPN and Arts & Culture.

The function itself is in the main feed. You just need to rewind down a bit to the offer to find your portrait in the museum.