Google announced a significant expansion of it Google Art Project on Tuesday, adding artwork from the White House and other museums around the globe.
Google's Art Project now includes the aforementioned White House galleries, but also notable international museums like the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, India, or the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
"Since we introduced the Art Project last year, curators, artists and viewers from all over the globe have offered exciting ideas about how to enhance the experience of collecting, sharing and discovering art. Institutions worldwide asked to join the project, urging us to increase the diversity of artworks displayed," Google said in a blog post. "We listened."
"The Art Project is part of our efforts to bringing culture online and making it accessible the widest possible audience," Google said, with digital archives of Nelson Mandela, for example.
Google's digitization projects have been integrated with Hangouts and Google+ sharing, the company said. New tools include Explore and Discover, by which users can find artworks by period, artist, or type of artwork.
Google also has a "museum view," which allows viewers to walk the virtual halls of museums like the Palace of Versailles in France. The collections were shot using a special "Street View" camera, which stitched together more than 385 rooms across the various museums. The approach seems similar to the "Trail View" project launched by Nature Valley across several national parks.
The interior views are also accessible via Google Maps. Google has also taken Street View to the Amazon and to Russia, among other locations.
Finally, and most impressively, Google also now has 46 "gigapixel" images available in its collection, shot with a special high-resolution camera that allows viewers to see individual brushstrokes and other fine details. Examples include Vincent Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" and Rembrandt's "Return of the Prodigal Son." While the former is housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the latter is kept at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia - quite a journey for American art lovers.
The White House today also announced the White House Code Sprint, a call to developers around the country to use the Summer Jobs+ API to build job search apps for your favorite browsers, social networking platforms, smart phones and feature phones, the White House said.
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