Medium format cameras are widely used in commercial photography but they also have a thriving (if less well-publicized) life in museums, where they’re used to create high quality digital files of precious artwork. Those cameras, and the photographers who operate them, have some new competition from Google’s Art Camera.
This custom built, robotic camera creates gigapixel images from artwork. The robotic system steers the camera automatically from detail to detail, snapping hundreds of high resolution stills of the painting. A laser and sonar system ensure that the camera is always in focus while Google’s software ingests the stills and stitches them all together.
The results are on display in Google’s online Cultural Institute, where a user can zoom in up close on artwork without having to travel to a real museum (welcome to the future).
Google is now dispatching 20 of these Art Cameras to museums around the world. And, they’re free. Museums will be able to create incredibly detailed, gigapixels images with a robot/laser/sonar camera–for free.
It’s not clear if these cameras require Google personnel (photographers?) to operate (we’ve asked Google).
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