Google's Robotic Camera Invades Art Museums

Just in time for summer family vacation planning, Google's Cultural Institute has a new initiative up its sleeve: a robotic camera designed to take gigapixel photographs of the world's most famous artwork.

Whether you're contemplating a trip to see the Mona Lisa or the murals of Philadelphia, you can get some inspiration from the first 1,000 ultra-high resolution images of artworks the camera has photographed so far. Google's goal is to give you experiences you wouldn't get even in a museum, like the ability to view a collection of portraits all at once that are scattered in museums across the globe.

"For example, if you wanted to see Van Gogh's six famous portraits of the Roulin family up close, you'd need to travel across the Netherlands then over to LA and New York," said Cultural Institute engineer Ben St. John in a blog post. "Now the Art Camera can travel for you. It's already captured the Portrait of Armand Roulin, which you can explore alongside the rest of the family, all in one place."

The camera's tech is perhaps equally as impressive as its subjects. It's powered by a robotic system that automatically steers the lense over every detail of the artwork, taking hundreds of high-resolution close-ups as it moves. A laser and sonar detector keep the camera at a fixed distance so that the focus is constant on each brushstroke of a painting.

Once the camera passes over every inch, the close-ups are stitched together into a single image and uploaded to the Cultural Institute's online gallery. You can check out the camera at work in the video below.

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The Cultural Institute has actually been photographing museum collections for five years, but has only been able to share around 200 images. The robotic cameras will greatly reduce the time it takes to complete the photography, and St. John wrote that the Institute plans to send a "fleet" of these cameras from museum to museum around the world.