Google Cultural Institute, the company’s initiative to preserve the world’s culture and history by bringing it online, has developed a robotic device that tries to capture ultra-high resolution photos at a much faster rate.

The new camera of Google is called Art camera, which is designed to be far simpler to use, compared to other camera setups, making it easier for museums and other institutions to start digitizing the art and documents in their collection.

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"The capture time has been reduced drastically. Previously it could take almost a day to capture an image. To give you an idea, now if you have a one meter by one meter painting, it would take 30 minutes,” says Marzia Niccolai, technical program manager at the Cultural Institute.

Art Camera can cover a one meter by one meter canvas in half an hour, a process which might have taken a full day with previous technology. It uses a laser and sonar to capture close-up images of paintings, piece by piece. It then stitches these images together to deliver a single and super detailed photo that can be viewed online, up close and zoomed in.

The new camera photos feature a massive gigapixel resolution, allowing viewers to zoom in very closely on the artwork and seeing the fine brush strokes and tiny dabs in great detail sans pixelation or artifacts. It enables both students and art-lovers with a unique opportunity to get up close and personal with famous far-away classics.

One major disadvantage of Art Camera is the inability of capturing 3D objects or anything tremendously large such as sculptures and installations

The Cultural Institute has actually been photographing museum collections for five years, but has only been able to share around 200 images. In the meantime, there are more than 1000 works already on the Culture Institute site including O’Keefes and Monets, all viewable in high resolution for free.

TagsGoogle, Art Camera, Google Art Camera, Art Camera Gigapixels, Google Cultural Institute, museums, paintings