潮玩特區
作者：Eliza Murphy
5月18日是世界博物館日，如果今年你沒找到時間或者同伴一起去“泡館子”，穀歌就是你的福音！蘋果和穀歌可以說是科技業界兩大“點子寶庫”，總能想出別人沒想過的新主意，而且這些構想變成現實之後都能切實影響我們的生活。他們總是用實際行動證明了一點——創意就是力量！
Gone are the days of jet-setting【乘噴氣式飛機旅遊】 to galleries in Manhattan, Florence, London, or Madrid. Nowadays, all you need to become a museum maven【行家】 is an Internet connection. Google Art Project, the brainchild【腦力成果】 of a small group of art-happy Google employees, brings the Street View technology of Google Earth and Google Maps inside 17 museums around the world.
The Google Art Project collection consists of 1,000 works of art by more than 400 artists, and this is only the beginning. Google hopes to add more museums and works of art to its virtual【虛擬的】 tour soon.
As I explored the project, I couldn't help but recall my first college art history class, in which we covered centuries of art in just over three months. Do I remember specifics about any single work of art? Of course not. The only other memory was my professor's words about every famous work of art: "You couldn't possibly understand until you see it firsthand【第一手,直接】."
Providing access to artwork is what the project aims to do. Amit Sood, Google Art Project's director, said that his team wants to "help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have galleries on their doorsteps, but a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close."
Now I can stroll【漫步】 through the aisles【過道】 of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and study the renowned【著名的】 use of light and shadow in Rembrandt's Night Watch on my lunch break. The team behind Street View enables these 360-degree virtual tours of museum interiors【內部】, and each museum features one work of art in super high-resolution【分辨率】 by using gigapixel【十億像素】 photo-capturing technology.