Mountain View, California — The old adage: ‘A picture is worth thousand words’ is befitting as the Getty Museum on Monday announced that it has become the first museum to adopt Google’s image recognition application known as Goggles, and with this all a visitor has to do is photograph a painting and receive a guided virtual tour in exchange.
The Brentwood institution stated that it wants to offer patrons and art lovers a richer art experience. Hence, Getty is the first museum in the country to adopt the Google Inc. app. Data available includes artist biographies, information about other works and audio files.
Google’s Shailesh Nalawadi demonstrates his company’s image recognition app on a 14th century painting at the Getty.
“A large number of the world’s information is visual in nature,” says Nalawadi. “Paintings like these are a part of our culture. So we believe that using a tool like Goggles, making these paintings identifiable and allowing a whole new generation of users to interact with this work of art is very important.”
Surprisingly, curators have always struggle to compress all their exhibit information onto limited text space next to a painting. “With this application, visitors can now get a much fuller story from the more detailed information delivered on their mobile device,” said Scott Schaefer, Getty’s senior curator of paintings.
Google Goggles, the scanning app that promises to distinguishes everything from your soup can to your local landmark, can now pull content down from the Getty Museum’s mobile website. The Mountain View, Chocolate Factory has now made it truly simple, just take a picture with your smartphone and the Goggles application scours millions and millions of digitized images to tell you whether it depicts a book, a CD, or a magazine cover.
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Just take a picture of a painting in the Getty’s galleries and you will get informational text, an entertaining audio description, and the ability to share it online. Besides, visitors can read about the museum’s artwork and listen to commentary from artists and curators. Some characters within the painting can even come to life with lively conversation provided by Getty.
Google Goggles product manager Shailesh Nalawadi, whose engineering team is stationed in the technology titan’s Santa Monica office, says they wanted to start local. “We always had the museum approach in mind,” he says, “and because the engineering team is here in Los Angeles, we wanted to do it with an L.A. Institution.”
“When we sit at lunch in our Google cafeteria here, we can look out and see the Getty,” he adds.
Basically, Google Goggles is a visual search engine that is switched on not by entering in key phrases but by taking a picture on your smartphone of the object (be it a book or historic landmark) in question. It is referred to as a “visual query.” Now Getty visitors using the program can take pictures of paintings that interest them to bring up links to information, starting with content prepared by the museum.
Maria Gilbert, a senior content developer at the Getty Museum, states the new application “does not change any existing technology” at the museum. Rather, it is designated to be another alternative for visitors who would rather not spend $5 on traditional audio guides or spend the time to type key phrases into Web browsers to access online information.
Of course, the museum still has wall tags identifying Manet’s “Rue Mosnier With Flags” or Monet’s “Rouen Cathedral,” but Gilbert comments that the new application has the advantage of letting you save and read information after the visit from the comfort of your home. In addition, it will also translate written information like wall labels that you photograph into a language of your choice.
However, there are some rules: Some paintings are off limits because of copyright laws and to protect the art, no flash photography is allowed.
Visitors will also be asked to use earphones to avoid disturbing others.
Getty created a mobile version of its collection data and provided it to Google to guarantee the most accurate and relevant results for searches, museum officials said.
“Google Goggles equips people to easily explore the world around them with a mobile device, creating a richer, more engrossing experience,” said Nalawadi.
Furthermore, the application is more successful with two than three dimensions, Google Goggles already recognizes some photographs and paintings from other museums — including world-famous artworks the database has picked up by crawling the Internet.
Nevertheless, This is the first partnership by which a museum has provided images and organized content for this specific use. The Getty has furnished information on the artist and artwork for about 300 paintings. About half of those have audio snippets as well. Gilbert says the project was done at no cost to the Getty, because it essentially involved repurposing existing visitor and website content.
Earlier this year, Google unleashed a more ambitious museum initiative: the Google Art Project, which offers users a virtual tour of 17 prestigious museums across nine countries and the power to zoom in and magnify any inch of more than 1,000 artworks.