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An eye for detail: Zoom through 1,000 artworks thanks to the new Art Camera from the Google Cultural Institute
May 17, 2016
So much of the beauty and power of art lives in the details. You can only fully appreciate the genius of artists like Monet or Van Gogh when you stand so close to a masterpiece that your nose almost touches it. As you step back from the brush strokes, you wonder how it all comes together. At the Google Cultural Institute, we know that people love experiencing art in close detail. Millions of people spend time exploring our ultra-high resolution “gigapixel” images, inch by inch—spotting something new every time, like a
hidden signature
or the
individual dabs of paint
that give the impression of shimmering, turbulent waters.
Zooming into these images is the closest thing to walking up to the real thing with a magnifying glass. This is why we’re so excited about our new Art Camera—a custom-built camera ready to travel around the world to bring people more of these ultra-high-resolution images than ever possible before.
The Port of Rotterdam by Paul Signac, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
A gigapixel image is made of over one billion pixels, and can bring out details invisible to the naked eye. So creating digital images in such high resolution is a complex technical challenge. You need time, highly specialized and expensive equipment, and only a few people in the world can do the job. In the first five years of the Google Cultural Institute, we’ve been able to share about 200 gigapixel images. But we want to do much more. That’s why we developed the Art Camera.
The Art Camera is a robotic camera, custom-built to create gigapixel images faster and more easily. A robotic system steers the camera automatically from detail to detail, taking hundreds of high resolution close-ups of the painting. To make sure the focus is right on each brush stroke, it’s equipped with a laser and a sonar that—much like a bat—uses high frequency sound to measure the distance of the artwork. Once each detail is captured, our software takes the thousands of close-up shots and, like a jigsaw, stitches the pieces together into one single image.
Many of the works of our greatest artists are fragile and sensitive to light and humidity. With the Art Camera, museums can share these priceless works with the global public while ensuring they're preserved for future generations. We want to give museums the tools they need to do this important work, so we're sending a fleet of these cameras from museum to museum around the world—for free.
The Art Camera will dramatically increase the scale and depth at which museums are able to provide access to our shared cultural heritage to anyone around the world. For example, if you wanted to see Van Gogh’s six famous portraits of the Roulin family up close, you’d need to travel across the Netherlands then over to LA and New York. Now the Art Camera can travel for you. It’s already captured the
Portrait of Armand Roulin
, which you can explore alongside
the rest of the family
, all in one place.
Today, we’re sharing the first thousand ultra-high resolution images of artworks from artists including
Pissarro
,
Signac
,
Rembrandt
,
Van Gogh
,
Monet
and many more from museums across Australia, India, the Netherlands, Brazil and everywhere in between. As we prepare to celebrate
International Museum Day
and welcome more than 25 new museums on the Google Cultural Institute, we want to thank everyone who worked with us to test the new camera in the recent months. Thanks to their work, today you can start zooming and
explore more art in the details than ever before
!
Posted by Ben St. John, Engineer, Google Cultural Institute
Ben St. John
Engineer
Google Cultural Institute
Introducing Spaces, a tool for small group sharing
May 16, 2016
Group sharing isn’t easy. From book clubs to house hunts to weekend trips and more, getting friends into the same app can be challenging. Sharing things typically involves hopping between apps to copy and paste links. Group conversations often don’t stay on topic, and things get lost in endless threads that you can’t easily get back to when you need them.
We wanted to build a better group sharing experience, so we made a new app called
Spaces
that lets people get people together instantly to share around any topic.
With Spaces, it’s simple to find and share articles, videos and images without leaving the app, since Google Search, YouTube, and Chrome come built in.
When someone shares something new to a space, the conversational view lets you see what the group is talking about without missing a beat.
And if you ever want to find something that was shared earlier—articles, videos, comments or even images—a quick search lets you pull it up in a snap.
You can create a space with just one tap for any topic and invite anyone via messaging, email, a social network, or whatever way you like.
We’ll also be experimenting with Spaces this week at Google I/O. We’ve created a space for each session so that developers can connect with each other and Googlers around topics at I/O, and we've got a few surprises too. If you’re joining us in person at I/O, make sure you install Spaces on Android or iOS before you arrive!
Spaces
is rolling out today on
Android
,
iOS
, desktop, and mobile web for all Gmail addresses. Give it a try and create your first space today.
Posted by Luke Wroblewski, Product Director
Luke Wroblewski
Product Director
Introducing The Data Center Mural Project
May 12, 2016
Whether it’s sharing photos, searching the web or translating languages, billions of requests are sent to “the cloud” every day. But few people think about how all this information flows through physical locations, called data centers. Because these buildings typically aren’t much to look at, people usually don’t—and rarely learn about the incredible structures and people inside who make so much of modern life possible.
To begin to change that, we created the
Data Center Mural Project
: a partnership with artists to bring a bit of the magic from the inside of our data centers to the outside.
We’re starting with two data center locations.
In Mayes County, Oklahoma, digital artist
Jenny Odell
’s mural is made up of Google Maps satellite imagery. Her mural artwork focuses on types of infrastructure that enable the flow of goods, power and information—not unlike data centers themselves.
Belgium local street artist
Oli-B
took inspiration from “the cloud” for his colorful mural on the outside of our St. Ghislain data center. He’s painted clouds that include elements specific to the region, the data center and the people who run it—including the sheep that roam the data center grounds and a balloon from the annual festival L'Ascension à Saint-Ghislain.
Soon, we’ll add murals at two more data centers, and eventually we hope to bring the project to more locations around the world. Check out photos, videos and more at
g.co/datacentermurals
.
Posted by Joe Kava, VP Google Data Centers
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_KYkQodSAYWnlv19FopyXOCbrcwTKWEal9hgx5dVSoAXl8PVIumlItedBQLnkLJm7LHyqEp9BEw8wnACHdFnwi-Xbmu2-FivMz2jbR-CngeZ1wayTUSlBt4A15Oe-A-WZYhvF/s1600/Launch-Thumbnail+%25281%2529.jpg
Joe Kava
VP
Google Data Centers
Meet Gboard: Search, GIFs, emojis & more. Right from your keyboard.
May 12, 2016
iPhone users—this one’s for you. Meet Gboard, a new app for your iPhone that lets you search and send information, GIFs, emojis and more, right from your keyboard.
Say you’re texting with a friend about tomorrow’s lunch plans. They ask you for the address. Until now it’s worked like this: You leave your texting app. Open Search. Find the restaurant. Copy the address. Switch back to your texts. Paste the address into a message. And finally, hit send.
Searching and sending stuff on your phone shouldn’t be that difficult. With Gboard, you can search and send all kinds of things—restaurant info, flight times, news articles—right from your keyboard. Anything you’d search on Google, you can search with Gboard. Results appear as cards with the key information front and center, such as the phone number, ratings and hours. With one tap, you can send it to your friend and you keep the conversation going.
Search in Gboard
You can search for more than just Google search results. Instead of scrolling to find💃 or 👯 , search for “dancer” and find that emoji you were looking for instantly. Even better—you can search for the perfect GIF to show people how you’re really feeling. Finally, Gboard has Glide Typing, which lets you type words by sliding your finger from key to key instead of tapping—so everything you do is just a little bit faster.
Emoji search, GIF search, Glide Typing
Gboard works in any app—messaging, email, YouTube—so you can use it anywhere on your phone. Get it now in the
App Store
in English in the U.S., with more languages to come.
Posted by Rajan Patel, Principal Engineer
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcmydrCwZysUfoHXb42h0DEetYmaXW3zcRs-TYUX5T2U5aTFSIaTUCBl-67RqEyn3hKFhTXwEUHpaCtMAWJaObV4RifO8o4MJf4qmV68sJGYvQAWz2NIybYEkVFk-an_dKaVlF/s1600/gboard_still_emojiGifSearch.jpg
Rajan Patel
Principal Engineer
Translate where you need it: in any app, offline, and wherever you see Chinese
May 11, 2016
Of the 500 million+ people who use Google Translate, more than 9 in 10 live outside the U.S. We've talked with thousands of you in India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Thailand to learn what works and what doesn’t—and today we’re rolling out some big improvements.
First, say hello to
Tap to Translate
on Android. We know millions of you painstakingly copy-paste text between Google Translate and other apps. Now, you can just copy the text of a chat, comment, song lyric, etc. in whichever app you’re using, and a translation will pop up right there—no need to switch apps:
Watch the video
to learn more. Tap to Translate works for
all 103 of Google Translate’s languages
on any Android phone running Jellybean (4.2) and above.
Next,
Offline Mode
now works on iOS, and joins Android in using small offline packages. We know that many of you found the previous packages too big to download on unreliable data connections or to keep on your phone’s limited storage. That’s why we shrunk them by 90 percent, to a much more manageable 25 MB each.
Offline Mode is easy to set up: Just tap the arrow next to the language name to download the package for that language, and then you’ll be ready to do text translations whether you’re online or not—and it works with Tap to Translate too. We’ve just added a Filipino language pack, bringing our
total number of offline languages
to 52.
Finally, we’re adding
Word Lens in Chinese.
It’s our 29th language for instant visual translation, and it reads both to and from English, for both
Simplified and Traditional Chinese
. Try it on menus, signs, packages, and other printed text. As with all Word Lens languages, it works offline.
With Tap to Translate, improved Offline Mode, and Word Lens in Chinese, we hope you’ll find the latest version of Google Translate a helpful companion. These updates are rolling out over the next few days.
Posted by Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUxnF0FcUkPM0fhG39Oh0FLl3qrymS8MeScV7SggcnO8oBq-UwBzm4rjrRs9QB6FFu9uQ5UTJWgH8bKEJAyAbkBNZUBI5HtXdaRDOBiOCfBWalZo-maNMMyunRQE-I8WBs7xN3/s1600/Milk_Chinese-English.gif
Barak Turovsky
Product Lead
Google Translate
Digital #LoveLetters from children of the incarcerated
May 7, 2016
Back in February,
we announced
a new effort from Google.org focused on racial justice, including support for organizations working to end mass incarceration. This is a critical issue in the United States,
which represents 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prison population
. And
Blacks are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites
—in fact, the United States imprisons a larger percentage of its Black population than
South Africa did at the height of apartheid
.
An often overlooked fact of mass incarceration is that many first-time, nonviolent offenders who receive prison sentences are parents. There are 2.7 million American children with a parent behind bars, and Black children are 7.5 times more likely to have a parent behind bars than their white counterparts. The experience of having a parent in prison is traumatizing to a child: a new
study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation
found that the incarceration of a parent can have as much impact on a child’s well-being as abuse or domestic violence.
So this Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, in an effort to raise awareness of the impact of mass incarceration, we’ve partnered with NGOs on Love Letters: a series of videos that contain children’s messages of love for a mother or father in prison. These digital love letters are demonstrations of the unbreakable love between parent and child, and of the pain of growing up without a parent present.
The videos reveal a side of mass incarceration that many people don’t get a chance to see. They allow us to bear witness, to be proximate to the very human costs of incarceration. Before I joined Google, I spent years as a human rights lawyer working on criminal justice reform. When I visited women’s prisons, I saw how broken women prisoners were because almost all were mothers to small children. Few received visits from family or children because of how remote women’s prisons usually are. When children did visit, some weren’t allowed to hug or touch their mothers. I also visited detention centers for girls, where many were the daughters of incarcerated mothers. The girls had been trafficked or arrested for running away from group homes or abusive foster placements, and they shared with me the pain of not having a mother there to teach them and protect them.
The impact of mass incarceration is generational and devastating. I hope that after
watching these videos
, you’ll choose to learn more about the critical work organizations like
The Osborne Association
,
Hour Children
, and Google.org grantees
Essie Justice Group
, the
Ella Baker Center
and the
Equal Justice Initiative
are doing to support children affected by incarceration and to advance criminal justice reform. You can also learn more about mass incarceration on
vera.org
and contribute to the conversation with #LoveLetters on social media.
Posted by Malika Saada Saar, Public Policy and Government Relations Senior Counsel – Civil and Human Rights
Malika Saada Saar
Public Policy and Government Relations Senior Counsel – Civil and Human Rights
Helping for the long term in Flint, Michigan
May 3, 2016
Access to clean drinking water is a concern all over the world, but in the United States it’s often a foregone conclusion. That is not the case recently for the residents of Flint, Michigan, many of whom we now know have been exposed to lead in their tap water. It’s a crisis, one to which the American people readily responded by donating water and resources to help alleviate the immediate pain. But the problem won’t go away quickly, and understanding its extent is both challenging and an absolute necessity. Today, Google.org is providing $250,000 to partners in the Flint community to help, with a special focus on a technical solution for understanding and resolving the crisis for the long term.
First, we’re making a
$150,000 grant to the University of Michigan-Flint
to enable the University of Michigan-Flint to develop a comprehensive data platform that will assist government and community leaders in making more informed decisions about the crisis and providing critical information to citizens. The funds will support student researchers at the University of Michigan, Flint and Ann Arbor campuses, to do this work under the leadership of Professors Mark Allison (Flint) and Jake Abernathy (Ann Arbor) to answer key questions about the crisis and response, such as the probability of lead levels before they are tested. The team plans to develop a platform and app that visualizes the data and also provides the ability for citizens to seek out and request key services, such as reporting concerns about water and requesting testing kits. Google volunteers will provide guidance and mentoring on the technology and product design.
We’re also making a
$100,000 donation to the Community Foundation of Greater Flint for the Flint Child Health & Development Fund
. The
Flint Child Health & Development Fund
was founded to ensure the long-term health of Flint families, especially newborns to children 6 years old—the group most vulnerable to developmental issues from lead. The Fund is a supplemental resource to state and federal funding and gives grants for childcare-related initiatives such as early childhood education, student support services, continuous access to a pediatric medical home, access to infant and child behavioral health services, and research.
With Google offices in Ann Arbor and Birmingham, Flint and its residents are also our neighbors. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, a group of 20 Google volunteers went to Flint and volunteered at the Food Bank of Eastern Michigan, where they helped with distributing bottled water and food in the greater Flint area. Around $35,000 has been donated through employees and Google's gift match program to the
United Way of Genesee County
and the
Flint Water Fund
to aid in the crisis, and our employee groups, like the Black Googler Network, continue to explore more ways to help.
As a native Michigander, I'm proud that we can help our neighbors in Flint. We hope we can support a resolution to this crisis and assist the residents of Flint in getting the resources they need and deserve, both for the short and long term.
Posted by Mike Miller, Head of Google Michigan
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