Google art gallery. Virtual museums in Google Art Project. How does a neural network work?

Services for finding doubles using photographs have been known for a long time, but Google managed to capitalize on this hype in 2018. The company has added a feature to the Arts & Culture guide to compare selfies with works of art. After this, the application, released back in 2016, topped the top free services in the American App Store. And got tens negative reviews due to lack of Android support and country-specific usage restrictions.

The Village found out how the neural network works and whether it is possible to “feed” your photo to it while in Russia.

How does a neural network work?

New service “Is your portrait in a museum?” helps the user find out if their selfie is similar to any of the thousands of works by artists and sculptors from around the world. To do this, Google uses its own facial recognition technology. After analyzing the image, the neural network displays a gallery of works of art depicting the user’s supposed doubles. All of them are accompanied by a percentage estimate of the accuracy of the match. In addition to selfies, the algorithm can also be “fed” any other photo, but not from the gallery, but a retake.

This google arts and culture app is pretty amazing. Feel real strong about my 40% 😳 pic.twitter.com/2iyexRkUG5

Pw (@petewentz) January 14, 2018

You can also find paired photos on social networks, which the users themselves jokingly combined. Google representatives explained that a fake can be identified by the absence of a watermark with the name of the picture or a white stripe between the pictures.

How to use the service in Russia

To open access to this section, you will need to convince Apple that you are, for example, in the USA. We tell you how to do this:

Log out. Go to your iPhone or iPad's settings, find "iTunes Store and App Store" and sign out of your current Apple ID.

Disable geolocation. Return to the settings and in the “Privacy” item, deactivate the gadget’s location detection.

Change region and language. Go back to the settings, go to “General”, and then to “Language and Region” and select US and English there.

Find the application. Go to the App Store and search there Google app Arts & Culture and click Get.

Register a new Apple ID. When you try to install the app, the App Store will prompt you to create a new one. account. Register it on email, which has not been used in Apple services before. Please enter the USA as your country of residence. The address can be filled in at random - for example, Oakland, 481 51st Street. Then you need to indicate California as the state, the zip code is 94608, and the phone number is, say, 510–201–5760. Bank card There is no need to link to this account.

Activate VPN. After downloading Google Arts & Culture, take your time to turn on the application. First, install a VPN service - for example, Free VPN - and activate settings in it that simulate you being on west coast USA.

If during the installation of applications the App Store issues a warning about account blocking, you will have to spend some time changing passwords over and over again. Then Apple will give up.

Launch Google Arts & Culture. If, after launching the application, a banner with a link to the “Is your portrait in a museum?” service does not appear in the “Home” section, experiment with the settings. Try turning on Airplane mode, reactivating location services, or reconnecting your VPN. Changing your account or logging out of Google in the main application menu can also help.

Now only the lazy did not publish the news that Google introduced new version its Arts & Culture app, which was released in 2016. This program for Android and iOS is a window into the world of art. Google has digitized high resolution a huge number of paintings and other works of art. This initiative publishes many articles and provides a map of significant cultural sites. A recent update added a fun feature based on a very complex algorithm. Artificial intelligence can use photographs to find a picture that will depict a person similar to you.

The problem is that the function to find yourself in a picture only works in the USA. To bypass this restriction you need to use a VPN. Turbo VPN for Android is perfect for this. Simply select the New York, USA server in the application and connect. Then open the Arts & Culture program and scroll down to the section where you will be asked to find yourself in the picture.

While the user interface is extremely simple, Google uses very complex facial recognition algorithms to compare your character traits with portraits among 70,000 works of art in the Google Art Project database.

For several years now, there has been an online alternative to real museums - paintings from MOMA, the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert Museum and other famous institutions can be viewed using Google Art Project. How is this digital “museum” of modernity being formed and how will it influence our perception of art? Luisella Mazza, program director, told Look At Me about this Google Culture Academy in Brazil, Italy and Russia, who spoke at the Intermuseum 2014 conference in early June.

Luisella Mazza

Google Culture Academy Program Manager for Europe

Why does tech company Google need its own Culture Academy?

What challenges do you face when digitizing artwork?

One of the most complex tasks is the creation of high-quality, gigapixel-sized images. We usually give museums the opportunity to digitize only one painting from the collection in this quality. However, sometimes we shoot other types of works this way. For example, we recently published photographs of the ceiling of the Opera Garnier, and working on them took a lot of time. In addition, before digitization began, we tested our technology in Madrid in another building to see if we could produce images of the required quality. The ceiling of the Paris Opera is at a height of 18 meters, and the painting is not visible from the hall with the naked eye. We decided to digitize it so that we could see what even visitors to the opera cannot see, and consider everything in the smallest details. When the project was finished, we could even see Chagall's signature in the corner, left in 1964, and this is incredible for people who have not had this opportunity before.

Many believe that the Google Art Project is changing our perception of paintings for the worse, because artists of the past did not expect their paintings to be examined in such detail.

It's great that the Google Art Project is sparking debate about how technology is changing the meaning of a work, the message of a painting, and the artist's intent. But as I already noted, cultural institutions themselves choose what work they want to digitize, and we fully trust their choice. We only provide the technology and platform, as well as the ability to insert embeds with paintings on the websites of the museums themselves. In addition, we give tools to users: we allow them to compare works, create their own galleries and share them.

How do scientists use the Google Art Project? Do you know of any interesting research?

Comparing paintings and documents from museums and libraries located on different parts of the world can be a very useful tool. This allows us to compare Van Gogh's letter from The Morgan Library & Museum, addressed to Gauguin and containing sketches, with the resulting painting, which is stored in the Van Gogh Museum. These digitized artifacts complement each other and give each other meaning because the writing provides the context in which the painting was created. IN real world we have no way to compare them because they are in different countries and on different continents. If you, as a scientist, need to compare them, it is not easy at all.

"Wheatfield with Crows", Vincent Van Gogh, 1890

Does Google Culture Academy do offline projects?

Yes, we participated in the organization dedicated to creativity Van Gogh exhibition The Man Suicided by Society at the Musee d'Orsay. One of the paintings, Wheatfield with Crows, painted in 1890, could not be brought to Paris because it was too fragile to be transported from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. That is why the curators replaced the painting with a screen with its photograph, which was created using our technology. This good example how digital versions of paintings can be useful in the real world and in real museums.

In addition, in December we opened our permanent physical space Lab in Paris. This is an experimental cultural platform, several projects are currently running there: for example, a residence for young artists in collaboration with 89plus - this project promotes authors born after 1989. In the Lab they work on their projects created using digital technologies. The “lab” also has a team of engineers, and in addition, artists can print their works on 3D printers, do laser engraving, etc.

Will the academy focus on preserving digital art - such as video games from the 1980s or works by artists who created works for the Internet?

No, but we are collecting interesting ideas from our partners. If our partners wanted to put such content online, we would definitely listen to them. In addition to photographs, Google Art Project also publishes videos showing installations and other works of contemporary art, because static photographs do not convey their essence and the author’s intentions.

How will the Academy of Culture develop in the future?

We are constantly coming up with new technologies to help cultural institutions. For example, we recently launched several museum mobile applications: We've come up with a universal framework that our partner museums can fill in to go beyond the experience their sites provide. So far, several Brazilian museums have launched such applications: the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Lazarus Segal Museum and the São Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art (MAM).

In addition, we are trying to improve our panoramas of “wonders of the world” created using Google Street View. We recently published a panorama of Cambodian Angkor Wat temple complex and supplemented it with comments from historians so that users could not only look at this landmark, but also find out all the necessary information about it.

There are a huge number of people in the world who, in principle, would not mind visiting museums, but they are just too lazy to get up from a comfortable soft chair to do so. And there are those who are ready to rise from it, but financial position or lack of time does not allow you to travel to another city or another country to see the “Mona Lisa”, “The Appearance of Christ to the People” and other masterpieces of painting. Exactly for such people, and indeed for all lovers visual arts, and a resource appeared Art Project from company Google.

Using Google Art Project, right on the project’s website, you can walk through the halls of museums, look at interiors, paintings, sculptures, read captions to them, the history of their creation, biographies of artists, leave comments, talk about your impressions, give advice, etc.

The paintings themselves were shot with a resolution of 7 gigapixels (yes, exactly 7 billion pixels!) So connoisseurs of fine art, if desired, can see every crack in the canvases, examine in detail and enjoy the confident strokes of their favorite artists.

Google has acquired an interesting function for comparing photos with creations famous artists. With its help, you can find out whether you resemble a character in a painting or sculpture.

The function is based on face recognition technology and a neural network. The latter will provide a number of options and indicate the percentage of similarity. Often the results turn out to be surprisingly accurate, but there are also some errors.

At the moment, the function is only available in some regions of the United States, but with the help of, for example, Turbo VPN, anyone can use it. It is important to indicate the USA as your location, and not every server will be suitable. Of the tested ones, the function appears only if connected to New York.

With Android everything is simple - download the VPN application and connect to the desired server. With iOS it’s more complicated: you need to disable your current Apple ID, disable geolocation, change the language to English and the region to the USA, and only then enable VPN and Arts & Culture.

The function itself is located in the main feed. You just need to scroll down a little to the offer to find your portrait in a museum.