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? Maybe you haven't been to Tretyakov Gallery Or the Hermitage? No problem - in just a couple of minutes, all this will become real for you!

You will walk the halls and see with your own eyes beautiful works art. Make yourself comfortable, because now I will tell you about a truly amazing online service from Google.

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

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 go to "quality new level save and transfer cultural heritage future generations."

The creators of this virtual museum service have done a lot of hard work. They transferred to the premises of museums the already tested by them on the project Google Earth Street View technology, which allows you to see everything as if you yourself were walking through the exhibition halls. 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, size)
• 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 is by no means trying 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, in-demand products. the highest level! Founders of Google Art Project We intend to gradually add more and more new museums of the world to our 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.

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 American App Store. And got dozens negative reviews due to the lack of Android support and usage restrictions 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 iPhone settings or iPad, 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 an app, the App Store will prompt you to create a new one. account. Check it out on email, which has not previously been used in Apple services. 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. bank card Do not link to this account.

Activate the VPN. After downloading Google Arts & Culture, take your time to turn on the app. First, install a VPN service - for example, Free VPN - and activate settings in it that mimic you being on west coast USA.

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.

When you walk, for example, along the Palazzo Pitti in Florence and look at not even the most famous paintings old masters, you understand why Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens or Van Dyck are generally recognized as the geniuses of painting, and not other artists of their time. When you see blue dancers» Edgar Degas with his own eyes, amaze with shades that “carriers” do not convey. But witty steel sculptures in the form of balloons different forms created by genius contemporary art Jeff Koons, do not shock in the gallery space as from a computer monitor - in photographs in the entourage of the urban environment, these objects look much more interesting. Travel, museums, galleries, "personal acquaintance" with great art - all this is wonderful. If you have time and opportunity for this. People who work around the clock in this place, according to the script, sigh loudly.

If, for some reason, engage in self-education in this direction, improve your perception of art and hone artistic taste in real museums and galleries of the world it is impossible to compensate for the lack cultural life and education will help virtual museums.

Google Culture Academy

Google Cultural Institute is a global educational online project, affiliate program which brings together hundreds of museums, cultural institutions and archives of the world. The significance of this multilingual project in the world educational process- colossal. The Google team travels to museums, digitizes the originals and makes the cultural treasures accumulated by mankind throughout the history of civilization open to anyone. Anyone can wander daily through the famous museum complexes and look at works of art in the smallest detail.

Video on how to use the Google Cultural Institute website

Some will say that this is not comparable to a personal presence, but for most people on the planet, the chances of one day going around all these museums in person are extremely small. As a rule, people work a lot and travel little. And in African countries, and why go far, in small Russian cities, virtual museums generally become almost the only opportunity to join the high world culture. As well as purposeful people receive higher education in an Internet cafe - they can also visit the expositions of the global virtual museum. Comparing a real museum and a virtual one, perhaps, is not worth it at all: this is not a choice between. It turned out this summer to visit the Louvre in person - great. Take a virtual tour a couple of times a week Cairo Museum or the New York Metropolitan? Perhaps this is even better, because it forms the habit of "regular" interest and familiarization with the culture. Virtual and real ways education in the field of art complement each other: a trained person perceives museum culture better, is familiar with works, has preferences if he has previously visited virtual museums.

Virtual Museums- without exaggeration, a brilliant technology that is necessary both in self-education and in school, institute, university education. The teacher, as a rule, does not have the opportunity to take his students or students to the best museums and galleries in the country and the world, but now he can conduct virtual tours for the class using tools Google Cultural Institute platforms, select specific works from the catalog for a thematic lesson and show their fragments in high magnification. Perhaps the students will not fully feel the coloring of Van Gogh or Monet, but they will certainly get a fairly good idea of ​​​​styles, trends, trends, compositions and plots.

Google Culture Academy Art Project

Google Culture Academy- multilingual project: on the Google Cultural Institute page, you need to go down and select Russian. Unfortunately, the titles of the works, even in the Russian-language mode, are displayed in English, but, in any case, the navigation elements are translated.

The Academy unites several projects: dedicated fine arts Art Project, the World Wonders Project about the natural and cultural wonders of the planet, and Archive Exhibitions. To obtain maximum benefit and the pleasure of this platform, it makes sense to accept the offer of the platform and really familiarize yourself with site features.

Art Project

In the virtual space Art Project Google Academies of Culture brings together 40,000 digitized copies of works created by 6,000 artists, photographers, sculptors, etc. These works are physically located in 250 cultural institutions in 40 countries of the world, in well-known and small specialized museums. The range of media includes photographs of oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, sculptures, artefacts, jewelry and furniture, including high resolution- some materials were even shot on a gigapixel camera, which allows you to see the smallest details using the zoom tool.

Among the museums whose funds were digitized for the art project of the Google Academy of Culture: the Hermitage and State Museum A. S. Pushkin, National Museum tokyo, London gallery Serpentine, Corning Glass Museum, MoMA, New York The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Canadian Ballet Museum, the Swiss Olympic Museum and hundreds of others. The list is huge, and the thematic variety of museums is very wide.

Google Culture Academy Art Project

Platform Interface Google Cultural Institute has a clear structure: you can switch between the main projects of the academy (expositions of world museums in the Art Project, archival materials in Archive Exhibitions and the wonders of the planet in the World Wonders Project); see in the menu thematic projects(For example, " Historical figures”, “History of the Holocaust”, “The Fall iron curtain”) and “customize” your cognitive process with the help of tools.

Among them:

• search;
• selection and sorting by museum collection, authors, exhibits, alphabetically;
• choice of layout;
• filters by time, date, technique, place, person, type of content;
• the ability to go to the official sites of museums;
• selection of museums with only the viewing mode of the halls;
• user galleries;
• adding a work to your Google account;
• tool for comparing two exhibits.

Thus, you can create your own galleries and send what you like to your friends. For teachers, this is an opportunity to pre-form a lesson program from specific works. Annotations to museums and exhibits have not yet been translated into Russian, but to get Russian-language information, you can always use search engines and Wikipedia.

The platform interface also integrates a map and the Google Street View tool. Users can virtually "walk", for example, through the exposition Versailles or white house and with the help of Google Street View, take a real tour of the area or city. Museum plans allow you to understand at what point of the building you are “located”, and choose halls, “walk” through them in the same way as through the streets on virtual cards cities.

The "architecture" of the virtual museum allows you to see certain paintings and when choosing a work, it immediately transfers to its real location. The user sees not just a photo, but the picture itself in the sunlit hall of Versailles (for example) - there is an effect of presence.

At Art Project has its own YouTube channel.

World Wonders Project

World Wonders Project- a project of the Google Academy of Culture, dedicated to the natural and man-made wonders of the world. This is a separate resource that can be accessed from the Google Cultural Institute platform. Filters allow you to make selections by continents and countries, as well as by collections.

Google Culture Academy World Wonders Project

Natural reserves and wonders of the planet; archaeological excavations and ancient ruins; noteworthy parks, regions and landscapes; cities, estates, palaces, castles, temples and other remarkable architectural objects plotted on a 3D visualization of the planet. The user can "slide" along its surface, choosing from the emerging red flags where to "land" and use the Street View tool ("street view").

A video demonstrating the possibilities of eLearning using the World Wonders Project.

It is noteworthy that one of the information pages of the project is intended for teachers. can be downloaded in ZIP and PDF format materials on history and geography for elementary and high school. There are not so many of them yet, but already existing training packages will be useful for eLearning lessons on the topics:

• Hiroshima Peace Memorial. Second World War and the beginning of the atomic era”;
• Pompeii, Herculaneum and Torre Annunziata. How did the Romans live?
• "Liverpool: the center of maritime trade";
• "The Palace of Versailles. Absolute monarchy. Architecture and history of Versailles”;
• "Florence. Italian Renaissance";

• "Independence Hall. Freedom and the US Declaration of Independence.

These materials for use in the classroom are provided free of charge, but only for English language. So it makes sense to follow the development of this section of the World Wonders Project (although English teachers will be quite happy now).

Team Google is doing a tremendous amount of work for this project: to create interactive panoramas, images taken from Google cars and Google vehicles around the world are combined into continuous images with a 360-degree viewing angle. Here's how it goes:

Archive Exhibitions

As part of the Google Cultural Institute project, you can also view and bookmark (favorite galleries) rare exhibits from museum archives that are not on public display. Museum administrations have realized the paradoxical nature of the situation in which the most valuable practically "does not exist": these exhibits are so cherished that almost no one sees them. To rectify the situation, the most advanced museums went to the Google Cultural Institute and published digitized versions of these cultural treasures. On the platform in the section "Milestones of history" the user enters online exhibitions dedicated to the most significant events in the history of mankind. These are expositions with unique documents, photos, videos and eyewitness accounts. Hint: do not forget to choose the Russian language - the names of the exhibits, unfortunately, are not translated, but it will be easier to navigate.

For what Google needs a virtual academy of culture? The answer is on official page Google Cultural Institute: In terms of social performance, the company wants to "organize all the information in the world so that it is easily accessible and useful." Besides, in digital format these materials will be better preserved for future generations, and now they will help teachers, scientists, pupils, students and everyone who is engaged in self-education, to receive and transfer knowledge. Google provides partner museums with a platform and tools. The expositions are formed by the museums themselves: thus, they are compiled by professional art historians and culturologists.

The Google Cultural Institute page has some valuable tips to help you get the most out of the project:

• Go to virtual tour- click on the yellow icon in the form of a man.
• Consider the smallest details. Some paintings can be zoomed in so that the user can see brush strokes.

• Create your own gallery and share: this will help structure your preferences and develop interests, as well as publish links to works on social networks.
• Arsenal Pavilion- Paris in 2020 on a huge Liquid Galaxy display;
• Relief maps of France - France XVII century on Google Earth.

Cover illustration: Photo by on

per century digital technologies You can exchange absolutely any information. It sounds promising, but in fact, most of us receive and send only a couple of hundred messages and a few videos every day - you see, a rather mediocre use of the opportunities provided to us.

It would be much more useful to use technology to improve one's own cultural level. But few companies are interested in developing such tools: digital libraries, for example, every day they fight for their own survival, fighting off numerous attacks from copyright holders, and if images of paintings are found, they are almost always not of very good quality.

However, such large corporation how Google has excelled in this field - a few years ago it launched an initiative called the Google Cultural Institute, of which it is Google Art Project- the largest collection of images of works of art on the web. free access to which absolutely anyone from anywhere in the world can get.

Google has made art accessible to everyone. You no longer need to save money for a ticket to New York and stand in line at the Museum of Modern Art in order to look at Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night. All you need is a computer with internet access.

The corporation cooperates with 250 partners. On this moment 45,000 works of art have been digitized. Each exhibit is available in the virtual gallery in excellent quality. Some can be enlarged enough to see the strokes of the canvas, the resolution in this case is a whole gigapixel. You can either leaf through the works of the masters or walk through the halls of the galleries - Google cameras specially designed for the Art Project captured them too.

In addition, the Google Art Project has a number of advantages over real museums. Firstly, as it was written above, from anywhere in the world you can get access to almost any significant gallery of our time. The second follows from the first - using a convenient search or heading, you can get acquainted with all the works of the author or even a whole trend in art without leaving your own chair. Thirdly, the Google Art Project has a work comparison function - in this mode, you can simultaneously view the smallest details of several paintings at once. And finally, fourthly, in the Google Art Project you can create as your own virtual galleries, and to get acquainted with the selections of other users.

It is interesting that in addition to museum exhibitions and exhibits, the Art Project also includes expositions that have not been presented before - for example, the Google Wonders of the World project and works from museum archives, united by one theme.

It is great that such a project has been successfully existing and developing for more than a year. At the time of 2012, the site was visited by more than 20 million people, the resource is in demand and is popular. Have you visited the Art Project? Did you find it useful for yourself?