Google's new camera lets you browse artistic masterpieces in excruciating detail

The Google Art Camera will be deployed in museums across the globe to capture gigapixel images of famous art. It's powered by a robotic system that automatically steers the lense over every detail of the artwork, taking hundreds of high-resolution close-ups as it moves.

For more information on the paintings already captured by the Google Art Camera jump over to the official Google website via the link below. A laser and sonar detector keep the camera at a fixed distance so that the focus is constant on each brushstroke of a painting. Fittingly called the Art Camera, the extremely high-resolution robots will be lent out to museums for free, and photos taken with them will appear on Google's online Culture Institute. Being able to zoom in to the component parts of a painting - the individual brush strokes, dabs of color, or the texture of the medium itself - reveals some of the hidden secrets of its creation, and inspires a deeper emotional connection to the work. Each scan is then sent to Google's servers where they are merged and a 1 Gigapixel file is created in just a few hours.

For those who want to enjoy the Museum experience, Google launched the Art Camera. And critically, it's also much faster.

Culture Institute technical program manager Marzia Niccolai said in a statement that with the help of the new camera, the capture time has been lessened a lot.

In preparation for tomorrow's International Museum Day, the Google Cultural Institute has opened the floodgates on its high-res art collection, containing some must-sees ranging from Rembrandt to Monet. Previously it could take nearly a day to capture an image. "With the Art Camera, museums can share these priceless works with the global public while ensuring they're preserved for future generations".

Twenty Google Art Camera are now working in museums across the globe, the results from which you can see on the Google Cultural Institute's website. A cutting-edge camera designed by Google Cultural Institute has innovated a camera with superpowers to snap century-old masterpieces in lucid detail, unlike a smartphone.