Technology Invites a Deep Dive Into Art

Featured on nytimes.com

For many years, patrons were asked to turn off their cellphones when they entered a museum. Now, they’re encouraged to use them with technologies like augmented and virtual reality, touch-screen tables and customized audio tours. The goal is to enhance the visitor’s experience while keeping the artwork front and center. Here are some examples.

Dreams of Dalí

This virtual reality experience drops the viewer into Dalí’s 1935 painting “Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s ‘Angelus,’” where he or she moves through a vast desert full of dreamlike oddities, like enormous elephants on stick legs, or a ringing telephone. The technology, including headsets from Oculus Rift, allows users to control where they want to go within the painting. A 360-degree video gives a taste of the experience.

Created by the digital ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners for “Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination,” the exhibition ran from January to June at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., in a collaboration with the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.

A Global Platform

Museums all over the world are digitizing their art collections using Google’s Art Camera, which produces images with more than one billion pixels.

By building the Google Arts & Culture platform for the web and as an app, Google has enabled museums to upload that content so that it can be shared widely. One way museums can do that is by using Google’s Art Camera, which produces images with more than one billion pixels. It has been available at no cost to museums and cultural institutions for about a year.

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