Official Google Australia Blog

Explore museums and great works of art in the Google Art Project

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog.

One of the things I love about working Google is that you can come up with an idea one day and the next day start getting to work to make it a reality. That's what happened with the Art Project—a new tool we're announcing today which puts more than 1,000 works of art at your fingertips, in extraordinary detail.

It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close.

We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge—like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors! Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for yourself today at www.googleartproject.com.

You’ll find a selection of super high-resolution images of famous works of art as well as more than a thousand other images, by more than 400 artists—all in one place. And with Street View technology, you can take a virtual tour inside 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Officer and Laughing Girl, Johannes Vermeer (The Frick Collection, New York - U.S.)

Here are a few things you can do:
Dive into brushstroke-level detail: On top of the 1,000+ other images, each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or “gigapixel” photo-capturing technology. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that's that’s around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera—and a specially-built “microscope view” uses Picasa to deliver these images at amazingly high resolution. You can zoom in to see Van Gogh’s famous brushwork or watch how previously hard to-see elements of an artwork suddenly become clear—such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Merchant Georg Gisze.”

The bedroom, Vincent van Gogh (Van Gogh Museum)

Explore inside the museums: the Street View team designed a brand-new vehicle called the “trolley” to take 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries. These were then stitched together and mapped to their location, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. We also created a new clickable annotation feature, so you can jump from being inside a museum one moment to viewing a particular artwork the next. Once inside an image, an info panel lets you read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. Gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.

Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy—with a view on Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”

Create your own collection: With the “Create an Artwork Collection” feature, you can save specific views of any of the artworks and build your own personalised collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends, family or on the web using the integrated goo.gl URL shortener.

We’re incredibly excited about this project—it’s our first step toward making great art more accessible, and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time. So whether you’re a student, an aspiring artist or a casual museum-goer, we hope the Google Art Project gives you a fun and unusual way to interact with art—and hopefully inspires you to visit the real thing.

Posted by Amit Sood, Head of Google Art Project

Coming soon to the big screen: Your Australian summer map

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Australia blog.
Last week we announced our plan to map the Australian summer with all your experiences. And you responded with videos around Australia, from racing your pets down a sand dune to surf lessons at the beach.

The map of Australia is starting to take shape, and this week, we’re raising the stakes. You may have caught the premiere of Life in a Day, the world’s first full-length user generated documentary. As part of this next generation of radically inclusive creative filmmaking, we’re proud to announce that Screen Australia, in partnership with renowned Australian filmmaker George Miller, will be working with one of the hottest up and coming Aussie directors to turn your summer map into the next great summer film. Only you can answer the question: What does an Australian summer really look like?

Hear from George Miller: What do you see, hear, and feel about the Australian summer?

We’ve just posted a summer playlist with short films from three Australian directors, Ariel Kleiman, Luke Doolan, and Amy Gebhardt, with their own versions of the Australian summer.

One of these directors will be working directly with George Miller to turn your videos into a final film which will debut at the Sydney Film Festival later this year.

What’s more, five members of the YouTube community whose footage is included in the final film will be invited to attend the premiere screening at the Sydney Film Festival.

Ever wondered what the Aussie summer looked like 60 years ago? Here’s one look at our summers past, courtesy of Screen Australia.

To take part in this year’s summer experience, upload your videos from to youtube.com/mapmysummer. You have until March 31st 2011 to film and upload. Let’s share the diversity and the extraordinary nature of this Australian summer with the world.

Ernesto Soriano, YouTube team, recently watched racing your pets down a sand dune.

Join Life in a Day today for its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival

Thursday, January 27, 2011

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Blog.

On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to take part in “Life in a Day,” an historic cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth. From Australia to Zambia, more than 80,000 videos, totaling 4,500 hours of footage, were submitted to the project. After months of hard work, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and a team of editors have created a 90-minute documentary film that gives a surprising, honest and entertaining self-portrait of our world.
While “Life in a Day” will be officially released later this year, tonight you have a very special opportunity to tune in to the world premiere direct from the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The premiere will be followed by a live Q&A with Kevin Macdonald and key contributors to the film. You can submit questions for the Q&A here.

Today’s stream begins at 12pm on the Life in a Day channel. You can catch a rebroadcast on Friday, January 28, at 7pm in your local time zone, captioned and subtitled in 25 additional languages, with an additional option for audio description (AD) in English.

We hope you enjoy the film!

Tim Partridge, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched “Life in a Day: A new type of filmmaking”.

Retiring real estate on Google Maps

Thursday, January 27, 2011

This is a cross-post from the Google Lat Long blog

At Google one of our key philosophies is to take risks and to experiment. To that end, in July 2009 we announced the ability to find property for sale or rent directly on Google Maps. This is one of the “search options” next to the search box on Google Maps, and is currently available in the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Japan.

In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings), we’ve decided to discontinue the real estate feature within Google Maps on February 10, 2011.

We’ve learned a lot and been excited to see real estate companies use Google Maps in innovative ways to help people find places to live, such as Coldwell Banker’s use of Google Maps and YouTube, or Realtor.com’s Android app that lets you draw a shape on a map to find all properties you’re interested in.

Yet we recognise that there might be better, more effective ways to help people find local real estate information than the current feature makes possible. We’ll continue to explore this area, but in the meantime, Google offers other options to home-seekers: you can still access other information in Maps such as local businesses, directions and transit times, as well as aerial and Street View imagery to explore where you might want to move, and also use Google search results to find helpful real estate information and websites.

Real estate companies can also continue to use tools from Google to help connect with buyers and renters who use the Internet to research properties. For example, companies can use the Google Maps API to embed customised maps that are useful to potential clients right on their own web pages. Our Google for real estate professionals site contains various methods for generating leads and improving real estate business operations.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP, Google Earth and Maps

What does an Australian summer really look like?

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

A cross-post from the YouTube Australia blogyoutube.com/mapmysummerRoaming through the Australian bush?Cricket at twilight?Tourism AustraliaUniversal MusicTennis Australiaa few of our favourites from Sydney FestivalAustralian summers past

Queensland Flood Emergency Information

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

the map hereUpdate: We've updated the map to include layers for river levels in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. We have also included a layer for road closures in Victoria.

Queensland Government Flood InformationABC emergency websiteNew South Wales Government Flood InformationVictorian Government Flood InformationPremier’s Flood Relief Appealis available here

YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011: We’ll see you in Sydney!

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

This is a cross-post from the YouTube Australia Blog.
A few months ago, we announced the second YouTube Symphony Orchestra to be held at the Sydney Opera House, and sent out a call to you, the YouTube community, to Play Your Part. We were blown away by the amazing videos we received in response, and the YouTube community voted on their favorites and visited the channel in their millions.

Today, we’re proud to present the 101 musicians from more than 30 countries around the world that have been selected to form the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011.

These outstanding musicians range in age from 14 to 49 and hail from five different continents, including 4 winners from Australia:

Brent MIller, Timpanist, overcame a neck injury and spinal problems to return to full-time secondary schooling in Toowoomba, Queensland, where he has performed with the University of Southern Queensland Orchestra, Toowoomba Concert Band, and the Queensland Youth Symphony

Mathisha Panagoda, Celloist, has toured Europe and China with the Australian Youth Orchestra, and has even performed at the 2000 Olympics! He has established his own chamber orchestra in Sydney, the Sydney Camerata, which is made up of young, talented musicians from around the country.

John Burgess, Bassist, was born in Queensland, Australia but grew up in the rural Mid North Coast. He began to take an interest in music at age 9, first on piano, then soon after picked up the bass guitar. He will be performing an improvisation to Mason Bates’ Mothership.

Rollin Zhao, Violinist, started playing music when he was two, and could read music before he could read words!

Also among the group is a vuvuzela-fixated trombonist from Germany, an Arizona-based clarinetist who has never left the U.S., and a Guzheng player from China whose instrument is one a lot of the world has never seen or heard before.

The orchestra and winning improvisers will be joined in Sydney by Michael Tilson Thomas, Mason Bates, and a number of professional musicians and mentors from the London Symphony Orchestra, The Berlin Philharmoniker, and the Sydney Symphony, to participate in a week-long celebration of music, creativity, technology and the arts. The week will include several ensemble concerts, classes for Australian musicians, events in and around Sydney, and the Grand Finale performance on Sunday, March 20 to be held in the Sydney Opera House concert hall and streamed live to the world on YouTube.

Everyone can participate in this celebration of creativity and technology. We’ll post videos and behind-the-scenes footage of the orchestra, from rehearsal and master classes to performance, to the YouTube Symphony channel, and to our mobile apps (which you can download on the Android Market by searching for ‘YouTube Symphony Orchestra’ or on the Apple App Store.

Be sure to tune in for more details on the week’s events.

Next stop: Sydney.

Ernesto Soriano, YouTube Australia, recently watched “Synergy: Unsung Heroes” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq_sBkNkGpY

Australia Blog

Explore museums and great works of art in the Google Art Project

Coming soon to the big screen: Your Australian summer map

Join Life in a Day today for its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival

Retiring real estate on Google Maps

What does an Australian summer really look like?

Queensland Flood Emergency Information

YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011: We’ll see you in Sydney!

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