Google Virtual Tour Preserves Collections Destroyed in Brazil Museum Fire | Smart News | Smithsonian

peter.suber's bookmarks 2018-12-28

Summary:

"In early September, a fire roared through the 200-year-old National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, destroying up to 90 percent of its precious collections. The extent of the damages was “incalculable,” Brazil President Michel Temer stated on Twitter at the time. “Two hundred years of work, research and knowledge have been lost.”

 

While it is true that little can be done to restore so many of the museum’s irreplaceable specimens and artifacts, a recently launched Google Arts & Culture project hopes to see the institution live on in the digital realm. As Kelly Richman-Abodou reports for My Modern Met, Street View imagery has made it possible to take a virtual tour of the museum as it stood before tragedy struck.

In what would prove to be a fortuitous collaboration, Google started working with the National Museum of Brazil in 2016 to digitize the museum’s collections and capture its interior through “high-resolution photography, photogrammetry, 3D laser scanning, and virtual and augmented reality,” writes Chance Coughenour, program manager of Google Arts & Culture, in a blog post. Google has embarked on similar projects with many other museums and heritage sites, but its partnership with the National Museum of Brazil has become particularly important in the wake of the fire...."

Link:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/google-virtual-tour-preserves-collections-destroyed-brazil-museum-fire-180971109/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.digitization oa.glam oa.preservation oa.3d oa.museums oa.vr oa.ar oa.brazil oa.google oa.ch oa.latin_america oa.south

Date tagged:

12/28/2018, 09:31

Date published:

12/28/2018, 04:31