Employees of Google work at a 'tech stop' at the internet company's new office space inside historic Chelsea Market June 23, 2008 in New York City. (Photo : Getty Images/Spencer Platt)
Google's Art Camera has documented 1,000 great works of art to preserve it for the future. The high resolution camera's purpose is to assist museums of digitizing art and documents in their collection.
According to The Verge, the Google Cultural Institute has captured and organized 200 great works of art in images with very high resolution, and it has scanned 1,000 works of art after a few more months. This quick boost of scanning artwork is all thanks to the new high resolution camera that the internet company has created, which is the Art Camera.
The purpose of this new digital camera is to help different museums from all over the world, which is by turning their art and document collections into digital images in high resolution. The advantage of this camera is it is simpler and easier to use than other camera setups, which were very complicated to put up. With this camera, the digital processing has become much faster.
According to the official blog of Google, the Art Camera is a custom-built robotic type of camera, which has a purpose of creating gigapixel images in a faster and easier way. The robotic system is there to move the camera automatically to capture the artwork from detail to detail, which will take a lot of high resolution close-up images of the painting. It is even equipped with a laser and sonar to make sure the focus is right on each brush stroke of the painting.
Culture Institute technical program manager Marzia Niccolai said in a statement that with the help of the new camera, the capture time has been lessened a lot. In the past, it took almost a day to finish scanning an artwork. With the new camera, a one meter by one meter painting would only take 30 minutes to finish scanning, she added.
The camera has some flaws to improve on, which is its limitations of only scanning flat objects like a painting. 3D objects or any big structure will not be scanned by the camera, so the internet company has to bring in other devices to assist the camera for such jobs.
