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Seeing Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum a decade or so ago totally changed my view of seeing things in a museum vs. seeing them online. I'm a child of the interne

Seeing Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum a decade or so ago totally changed my view of seeing things in a museum vs. seeing them online. I'm a child of the internet and had this view that seeing it on my screen was good enough, but wow is Night Watch incredible up close and in person. Overwhelming, almost. A totally different experience. That said, this image is amazing, and lets you see a lot more detail than you can easily manage at the museum.

bitexploder 5y ago
Our brains just love the tactile. Knowing you are feet from the threads and paint of a master. That you can connect with this long dead artist so closely, in 3 dimensions. It’s very human.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  Oil paintings look quite different depending on the angle you view them from too, that's something that I don't think can be recreated without some kind of VR / head tracking
  - bsenftner 5y ago
    I did early interactive multimedia art history documentaries, with voyages into paintings through voiced over descriptions and closeup montages. It was captivating work, each documentary being 7 hours of material, in 8 languages. Because Philips and Sony were trying to prove CD-ROMs to the consumer back then, 42 years ago, they spent money. We got access to museum archives, worked on some of the first digital scans of a good number of well known pieces, and had celebrities reading the voiced over narratives. We had these weird Sony News Unix workstations with newspaper layout monitors - huge grey scale displays, spoiled me until 4K monitors finally arrived. That was '89-'94, the end of the dawn of all this digital media we take for granted today.
    - DonHopkins 5y ago
      That must have been quite a fun ride! It really boggles my mind how you can get such cheap light high quality monitors now. And now we just waste them displaying these ugly orange web pages and Skittles colored TypeScript code. I remember hearing about the Sony News Unix workstation, and being dismayed that it didn't run Sun's NeWS window system. ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_NEWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_NEWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
    - duckmysick 5y ago
      Sounds really interesting. Is this still available somewhere?
      - bsenftner 5y ago
        The platform no longer exists, it was "CD-I", a pre-internet hybrid CD-ROM format with extensions for real time streaming. Intimate experience with that early real time streaming got me on the original Sony PlayStation OS team in Tokyo.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Very true! See my previous comment on Paul Debevec's Light Stage and Rouen Revisited, and check out some of the vidoes of Paul Debevec talking about and demonstrating it -- he's great at explaining and showing how it works, and it's useful in many different ways, including AR/VR, video games, movie production, art appreciation, online museums, historical preservation, 3D portraits (they captured Obama!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069100 Scanning and Printing a 3D Portrait of President Barack Obama: https://vgl.ict.usc.edu/Research/PresidentialPortrait/ https://vgl.ict.usc.edu/Research/PresidentialPortrait/
- labster 5y ago
  I’m a religious person, but we don’t need this religious mumbo-jumbo to explain why oil paintings are better in person. They just provide more experience in person. A photo gives you one angle and flattens the depth. The real object is designed to be viewed from lots of angles. It looks different from close up, as it does from far away. It interacts with the ambient light. If you walk a couple buildings over from the Night Watch, you get a whole museum dedicated to me droog, Vincent van. And Van Goghs are so highly textured with impasto that they are far more radiant, more life-like, in person. That said the quality of museum experience is important. If you get rushed through the queue to see the Mona Lisa for fifteen seconds (and it’s pretty small), you’ll probably enjoy a print more.
  - acomjean 5y ago
    The Getty museum in California uses natural light in their galleries which was pretty special. Your right about the mono Lisa. When I went 1 year before the pandemic you couldn’t get close. and it was the only painting in its own room. Luckily that museum has no shortages of good paintings. There are a couple of VanGoghs at the Rodin museum in France which are pretty amazing and not to busy.
    - labster 5y ago
      The Getty is a great museum except for the art. Not that it’s bad, it’s just that the collection is not the great artists at their best. If you want a better art experience, head over to the Norton Simon in Pasadena. Simon was an art collector who was rich, while J. Paul Getty was a rich person who collected art, and the difference really shows in the collection quality. Both Getty museums are really good architecturally, and worth a visit. Good tip on the Louvre, though. The best art is not the most famous, but whatever emotionally connects to you. And most museums have plenty of pieces that can do so.
  - bitexploder 5y ago
    It isn‘t “religious mumbo jumbo”. I didn’t even mention religion. Information encoded using multiple senses will form different and more lasting memories for most humans. I think you managed to agree with what I wrote and dismiss it at the same time.
pitched 5y ago
I had the same experience with the Mona Lisa too. Even going in not expecting to get much out of the experience, it really popped, even on the other side of a crowded room. I wonder if it has a bit to do with it being 3D too, where the edges of paint strokes might catch the light a bit differently than under a scanner.
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y ago
  The Mona Lisa was the most disappointing art work I've ever seen. Size, color, everything. And I was lucky enough to see it up close unlike the arrangement now.
chriscjcj 5y ago
So very true. Particularly true about the Sistine Chapel. This virtual view is outstanding, but can't possibly come anything close to seeing it in person. https://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html https://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.htm...
- defaultname 5y ago
  I'm going to be the contrarian: Unless you're getting an exclusive viewing and you wake fresh with a singular goal, seeing the great art of the world is likely to be a compromised experience. When overwhelming beauty and art surrounds you, and a hectic schedule dogs you, everything is dulled and the experience becomes almost a fog. My experience going through the Sistine Chapel was almost an aside to just days of overwhelming artistry, so I gave it barely the respect it deserved. I've enjoyed and experienced it virtually magnitudes more. A couple of years ago I did a trip to Belgium and France. Saw all of the sights, loads of museums, and did a tonne of wandering. It was a great time, but was overwhelming. I came home and maybe a week later we were browsing YouTube on the TV and came across a channel that just walks around neighbourhoods of Japan (e.g. Shibuya, Tokyo, among others. The channel is Virtual Japan). A couple of hours of walking a stabilized camera through the streets of a Japanese city. My son came in and watched with me while we looked at storefronts, read restaurant menus, walked through malls, virtually participated in pedestrian scrambles, etc). The weirdest thing is that days later my "trip" to Japan felt much more real than my trip to Belgium and France (or any prior trip I'd ever taken). Absent all of the worries and hustle and overwhelming inputs, somehow this completely not real experience felt much more real, and to this day I feel like I've been to Japan, while so many other countries that I've physically been to and experienced for weeks seem like almost a dream. It really was a fascinating experience for me. It made me wonder if there is a business in on-demand telepresence for this sort of virtual travel. "Uber" someone technologically enabled to walk around an area, look at things you want and follow directions. Add some dystopian elements to it and soon they're getting in fights at your request.
  - liber8 5y ago
    It sounds like you've discovered the secret to travel. You don't have to see all the sights or cram everything into each day. Usually you get more out of it if you take things slowly, be intentional about what you really want to do, and savor each experience. With two small kids now, we usually pick one city per trip and plan (at most) one morning activity and one afternoon/evening activity. Sometimes it's one activity per day, sometimes it's none (maybe we just meander around a neighborhood between meals, like your Virtual Japan experience). Like you said, if you see 10 different Roman churches in one day, the Sistine Chapel becomes just another fresco.
mutagen 5y ago
Yes, my first visit to the Met in NYC really opened my eyes to how impressive these works are in person and how much a photo on a screen does not convey. Not just the masters, but some of the portraits of people I've never heard of and by relatively unknown artists in styles I didn't particularly appreciate.
vmception 5y ago
Same, in a similar note I’ve been a big fan of Alphonse Mucha and Art Nouveau all my life and I had no idea that he used gold paint! Having seen so many jpegs and pictures in books of his works, it did not convey or describe this at all! I passed one in a gallery one time (not looking for one) and the sheen from the lights reflecting totally changed everything in a more amazing way!
- modeless 5y ago
  An RGB value per pixel is not all of the information you need to render a painting accurately! To capture the effect you describe, paintings should be scanned with something that can capture a BDRF. Then viewing them in VR could give a very accurate experience.
  - baq 5y ago
    i had to google BDRF: Bidirectional reflectance distribution function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_distribution_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_dist...
    - amelius 5y ago
      Shouldn't that include the color spectrum, and perhaps the polarization of the light?
      - modeless 5y ago
        Yes, if you want to go all the way. There are many simplified formulations of BDRFs that are commonly used that ignore polarization and even wavelength dependent effects (e.g. metallic/roughness used in physically based rendering for games which has only two parameters on top of the base color), but they would still be a huge improvement over not capturing any BDRF data at all.
  - deleted 5y ago
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mod50ack 5y ago
Never been to Amsterdam, but I felt the same way at other major art museums. Although I think the best aspect of going to a museum is not necessarily seeing the most popular painting. For instance, when I went to the Louvre, which --- and I say this as a person who is not a huge fan of tourist traps --- is one of the best things to visit in Paris, of course there are the most famous works (e.g., the Mona Lisa), which are good (don't get me wrong on this), but 90% of the stuff in the museum is not really being looked at closely by everyone. One of the best things about a really big museum is just going and looking at art that you never knew about before. Just taking a closer look at pieces and getting a new new favorites. I took a few notes when I was visiting! Side note on going to the Louvre. I went last summer and, thanks to Covid, had to reserve my (free --- thanks EU!) spot (which I did only a few hours before). As a result, getting into the museum was very quick. Surely, this had to do with the reduced number of people in Paris, too, but I now think that entrance by reservation is a pretty good system generally for such popular spots.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Prado in Madrid is an interesting place to visit too. Most of the religious art didn't resonate with me, some other pieces more, but Goya - Goya was from another world. I am not sure how many talents comparable to Goya ever walked the Earth.
- mabub24 5y ago
  The Louvre is one of the few places where I actually felt like I could get lost in a building. It simply goes on forever. The sheer amount of works, objects, and information, presented to a visitor is astounding and hypnotic. For modern paintings, I like the Musee d'Orsay slightly more; but for sheer art history the Louvre is truly one of the greatest institutions in existence and a must visit for anyone. They will recommend that you plan on not "seeing everything" in a lot of guides. Believe that. Making some choices for things you want to see beforehand will cut down on the exhaustion that often comes over you after you end up in a room filled with dazzling tea cups from 16th century France and yet you're just desperately trying to figure out how to get out. It happens to the best of us.
DonHopkins 5y ago
Paul Debevec created the Light Stage to capture high dynamic range reflectance fields (including clean high resolution normal/bump/gloss/texture maps) of human faces. It uses hundreds polarized LED lights and cameras, plus lots of image processing, to separate the lighting effects of specular reflectance (glossy shine) from subsurface scattering (glowing skin), so you can reconstruct the 3D image and relight it under different conditions, environments, and viewing angles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Debevec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Debevec https://www.pauldebevec.com/ https://www.pauldebevec.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_stage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_stage "The Light Stage With Paul Debevec" - 360 Video (captured with JauntVR panoramic camera): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xujwI4dimDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xujwI4dimDA Digitizing Photorealistic Humans Inside USC's Light Stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6QJT5CXl3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6QJT5CXl3o Paul Debevec: Light Fields, Light Stages, and the Future of Virtual Production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAe2dUJxe3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAe2dUJxe3w A Light Stage was featured in the 2013 film "The Congress", which is a 2013 film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's book, "The Futurological Congress", directed by Ari Folman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress I really love that movie and the book it was based on, which both raised some interesting issues: Like Blade Runner's relationship to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, it was a lot different than the book, but shares some deep ideas, and stands on its own as a great movie. The Congress Official Trailer (2014) Robin Wright, Jon Hamm HD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rNSTizOsws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rNSTizOsws The scan scene in the Light Stage at USC ICT's motion capture studio was emotionally riveting and technically realistic, with Robin Wright playing a partially fictionalized version of herself, with Harvey Keitel playing her agent, baring her face and soul to the sparkling panoptic all encompassing emotion capturing machine. The Congress (2013) Scan Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8 "Rouen Revisited" is an earlier interactive kiosk project that Paul Debevec and Golan Levin created in 1996 at Interval Research Corporation, based on photogrammetric modeling techniques he developed at UCB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao3kf0YQ31c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao3kf0YQ31c https://acg.media.mit.edu/people/golan/rouen/ https://acg.media.mit.edu/people/golan/rouen/ >Between 1892 and 1894, the French Impressionist Claude Monet produced nearly 30 oil paintings of the main façade of the Rouen Cathedral in Normandy. Fascinated by the play of light and atmosphere over the Gothic church, Monet systematically painted the cathedral at different times of day, from slightly different angles, and in varied weather conditions. Each painting, quickly executed, offers a glimpse into a narrow slice of time and mood. We are interested in widening these slices, extending and connecting the dots occupied by Monet's paintings in the multidimensional space of turn-of-the-century Rouen. In Rouen Revisited, we present an interactive kiosk in which users are invited to explore the façade of the Rouen Cathedral, as Monet might have painted it, from any angle, time of day, and degree of atmospheric haze. Users can contrast these re-rendered paintings with similar views synthesized from century-old archival photographs, as well as from recent photographs that reveal the scars of a century of weathering and war. >Rouen Revisited is our homage to the hundredth anniversary of Monet's cathedral paintings. Like Monet's series, our installation is a constellation of impressions, a document of moments and percepts played out over space and time. In our homage, we extend the scope of Monet's study to where he could not go, bringing forth his object of fascination from a hundred feet in the air and across a hundred years of history. Here's a paper about "Multifocus HDR VIS/NIR hyperspectral imaging and its application to works of art" that references his work, about how you can capture the 3D texture and hyperspectral reflectance field of artwork in a way that you could dynamically relight in different conditions and environments, interactively view in VR, use in high quality computer games and renderings, etc: https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-27-8-11323&id=408878 https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-27-8-11... >Multifocus HDR VIS/NIR hyperspectral imaging and its application to works of art >Abstract: This paper presents a complete framework for capturing and processing hyperspectral reflectance images of artworks in situ, using a hyperspectral line scanner. These capturing systems are commonly used in laboratory conditions synchronized with scanning stages specifically designed for planar surfaces. However, when the intended application domain does not allow for image capture in these controlled conditions, achieving useful spectral reflectance image data can be a very challenging task (due to uncontrolled illumination, high-dynamic range (HDR) conditions in the scene, and the influence of chromatic aberration on the image quality, among other factors). We show, for the first time, all the necessary steps in the image capturing and post-processing in order to obtain high-quality HDR-based reflectance in the visible and near infrared, directly from the data captured by using a hyperspectral line scanner coupled to a rotating tripod. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms the normal capturing process in terms of dynamic range, color and spectral accuracy. To demonstrate the potential interest of this processing strategy for on-site analysis of artworks, we applied it to the study of a vintage copy of the famous painting “Transfiguration” by Raphael, as well as a facsimile of “The Golden Haggadah” from the British Library of London. The second piece has been studied for the identification of highly reflective gold-foil covered areas. [...] >5. Conclusions and future work: In this study, a complete framework is introduced for the hyperspectral reflectance capture of a painting in situ, and under high dynamic range conditions. Both the high dynamic range and the focusing problem due to chromatic aberrations have been overcome by using multiple captures with different focus positions and exposure times. A final hyperspectral reflectance cube has been computed using weighting maps calculated for both sample and flat fields and the quality of this cube has been tested and compared with a spectral cube captured in the usual LDR and single focus way. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms the best low dynamic range capture acquired. The sharpness index, as well as the color and spectral metrics show that it is possible to achieve good quality spectral reflectance images using a hyperspectral scanner in non-controlled illumination conditions. Moreover, as an example application, highly reflective golden material has been segmented from a facsimile. Our results show that by applying the proposed framework for capturing and processing, those areas which saturate the sensor in the usual capturingway, can be correctly exposed and segmented using the HDR multifocus capture. In future research, a new version of this framework will be developed including piecewise cube stitching for blending different cubes captured in different regions of big paintings. This will allow us to get closer to the painting and retrieve higher spatial resolution data, whilst still maintaining the spectral resolution and performance achieved in this study. Moreover, we will use the spectral reflectance images computed in this study, together with X-ray fluorescence measurements for the non-invasive pigment identification, in order to help the dating of ancient paintings and other works of art. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging
NamTaf 5y ago
I noticed this most vividly when seeing Van Gogh's Sunflowers (the 4th, from the National Gallery in London). A high-res scan such as on Wikipedia [1] does no justice to just how textured the painting is. He's clearly applied quite thick strokes and, under proper lighting, the texture really pops in a way that screens simply cannot reproduce. It brings an entirely new dimension (pun intended) to the painting and really changes the whole expeirence. Proper, museum/gallery lighting really transforms art in a way that even prosumer screens simply cannot replicate, because you can move around the piece and the interplay of light against it does so much. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflowers_(Van_Gogh_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflowers_(Van_Gogh_series)
- joseluis 5y ago
  I'd love to see a dynamic raytracing of a high resolution 3d scan of this picture or another masterpiece. I doubt nobody has attempted to do this before.
- mabub24 5y ago
  Many of Van Gogh's, when seen in person, are almost more like relief sculptures because of the incredible depth of his strokes. I loved going right to the sides of the frames and looking across the paintings to see how each little valley in his strokes caught the light and cast tiny shadows. I think it's also what adds a lot to the kaleidoscopic feel of his works, alongside his color palettes and stroke work; the extra dimension makes his paintings vibrate with restrained energy in interplay with the surrounding light.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    My daughter and I went to an art supply store in December and we were surprised at the variety of paint bases. I had no idea. Many of them would be mistaken for sculptural material, almost like play doh or some like that, if you didn't know what they were. I had no idea.
- wil421 5y ago
  The Neue Pinakothek in Munich had a sunflower painting and I noticed the same thing. The textures really pop and there’s so much paint it is protruding from the canvas.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Extremely relevant to this is the excellent program Ways of Seeing by John Berger: https://youtu.be/0pDE4VX_9Kk https://youtu.be/0pDE4VX_9Kk
shever73 5y ago
I had exactly the same experience when I saw Caravaggio's "The Taking of Christ" in person recently. I was familiar with the image, but I was blown away by how incredible the painting really is.
- biorach 5y ago
  Agreed - photos diminish it - nothing can capture the intensity of the original.
pkcsecurity 5y ago
I think part of that is the architecture and environment of the museum. They spend tons of attention to the high ceilings, sense of awe (a bit like a cathedral), and that can make all the difference compared to viewing something in your bedroom in the dark.
sycren 5y ago
Is there any distortion/difference seeing the painting in real-life at an off-angle that cannot be replicated through current scans? And are there any neurological studies about seeing/feeling physical objects versus virtual? And would VR help close the gap?

bitexploder 5y ago

Our brains just love the tactile. Knowing you are feet from the threads and paint of a master. That you can connect with this long dead artist so closely, in 3 dimensions. It’s very human.

skhr0680 5y ago
Oil paintings look quite different depending on the angle you view them from too, that's something that I don't think can be recreated without some kind of VR / head tracking
- bsenftner 5y ago
  I did early interactive multimedia art history documentaries, with voyages into paintings through voiced over descriptions and closeup montages. It was captivating work, each documentary being 7 hours of material, in 8 languages. Because Philips and Sony were trying to prove CD-ROMs to the consumer back then, 42 years ago, they spent money. We got access to museum archives, worked on some of the first digital scans of a good number of well known pieces, and had celebrities reading the voiced over narratives. We had these weird Sony News Unix workstations with newspaper layout monitors - huge grey scale displays, spoiled me until 4K monitors finally arrived. That was '89-'94, the end of the dawn of all this digital media we take for granted today.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    That must have been quite a fun ride! It really boggles my mind how you can get such cheap light high quality monitors now. And now we just waste them displaying these ugly orange web pages and Skittles colored TypeScript code. I remember hearing about the Sony News Unix workstation, and being dismayed that it didn't run Sun's NeWS window system. ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_NEWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_NEWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
  - duckmysick 5y ago
    Sounds really interesting. Is this still available somewhere?
    - bsenftner 5y ago
      The platform no longer exists, it was "CD-I", a pre-internet hybrid CD-ROM format with extensions for real time streaming. Intimate experience with that early real time streaming got me on the original Sony PlayStation OS team in Tokyo.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Very true! See my previous comment on Paul Debevec's Light Stage and Rouen Revisited, and check out some of the vidoes of Paul Debevec talking about and demonstrating it -- he's great at explaining and showing how it works, and it's useful in many different ways, including AR/VR, video games, movie production, art appreciation, online museums, historical preservation, 3D portraits (they captured Obama!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069100 Scanning and Printing a 3D Portrait of President Barack Obama: https://vgl.ict.usc.edu/Research/PresidentialPortrait/ https://vgl.ict.usc.edu/Research/PresidentialPortrait/
labster 5y ago
I’m a religious person, but we don’t need this religious mumbo-jumbo to explain why oil paintings are better in person. They just provide more experience in person. A photo gives you one angle and flattens the depth. The real object is designed to be viewed from lots of angles. It looks different from close up, as it does from far away. It interacts with the ambient light. If you walk a couple buildings over from the Night Watch, you get a whole museum dedicated to me droog, Vincent van. And Van Goghs are so highly textured with impasto that they are far more radiant, more life-like, in person. That said the quality of museum experience is important. If you get rushed through the queue to see the Mona Lisa for fifteen seconds (and it’s pretty small), you’ll probably enjoy a print more.
- acomjean 5y ago
  The Getty museum in California uses natural light in their galleries which was pretty special. Your right about the mono Lisa. When I went 1 year before the pandemic you couldn’t get close. and it was the only painting in its own room. Luckily that museum has no shortages of good paintings. There are a couple of VanGoghs at the Rodin museum in France which are pretty amazing and not to busy.
  - labster 5y ago
    The Getty is a great museum except for the art. Not that it’s bad, it’s just that the collection is not the great artists at their best. If you want a better art experience, head over to the Norton Simon in Pasadena. Simon was an art collector who was rich, while J. Paul Getty was a rich person who collected art, and the difference really shows in the collection quality. Both Getty museums are really good architecturally, and worth a visit. Good tip on the Louvre, though. The best art is not the most famous, but whatever emotionally connects to you. And most museums have plenty of pieces that can do so.
- bitexploder 5y ago
  It isn‘t “religious mumbo jumbo”. I didn’t even mention religion. Information encoded using multiple senses will form different and more lasting memories for most humans. I think you managed to agree with what I wrote and dismiss it at the same time.

pitched 5y ago

I had the same experience with the Mona Lisa too. Even going in not expecting to get much out of the experience, it really popped, even on the other side of a crowded room. I wonder if it has a bit to do with it being 3D too, where the edges of paint strokes might catch the light a bit differently than under a scanner.

DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y ago
The Mona Lisa was the most disappointing art work I've ever seen. Size, color, everything. And I was lucky enough to see it up close unlike the arrangement now.

chriscjcj 5y ago

So very true. Particularly true about the Sistine Chapel. This virtual view is outstanding, but can't possibly come anything close to seeing it in person. https://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html https://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.htm...

defaultname 5y ago
I'm going to be the contrarian: Unless you're getting an exclusive viewing and you wake fresh with a singular goal, seeing the great art of the world is likely to be a compromised experience. When overwhelming beauty and art surrounds you, and a hectic schedule dogs you, everything is dulled and the experience becomes almost a fog. My experience going through the Sistine Chapel was almost an aside to just days of overwhelming artistry, so I gave it barely the respect it deserved. I've enjoyed and experienced it virtually magnitudes more. A couple of years ago I did a trip to Belgium and France. Saw all of the sights, loads of museums, and did a tonne of wandering. It was a great time, but was overwhelming. I came home and maybe a week later we were browsing YouTube on the TV and came across a channel that just walks around neighbourhoods of Japan (e.g. Shibuya, Tokyo, among others. The channel is Virtual Japan). A couple of hours of walking a stabilized camera through the streets of a Japanese city. My son came in and watched with me while we looked at storefronts, read restaurant menus, walked through malls, virtually participated in pedestrian scrambles, etc). The weirdest thing is that days later my "trip" to Japan felt much more real than my trip to Belgium and France (or any prior trip I'd ever taken). Absent all of the worries and hustle and overwhelming inputs, somehow this completely not real experience felt much more real, and to this day I feel like I've been to Japan, while so many other countries that I've physically been to and experienced for weeks seem like almost a dream. It really was a fascinating experience for me. It made me wonder if there is a business in on-demand telepresence for this sort of virtual travel. "Uber" someone technologically enabled to walk around an area, look at things you want and follow directions. Add some dystopian elements to it and soon they're getting in fights at your request.
- liber8 5y ago
  It sounds like you've discovered the secret to travel. You don't have to see all the sights or cram everything into each day. Usually you get more out of it if you take things slowly, be intentional about what you really want to do, and savor each experience. With two small kids now, we usually pick one city per trip and plan (at most) one morning activity and one afternoon/evening activity. Sometimes it's one activity per day, sometimes it's none (maybe we just meander around a neighborhood between meals, like your Virtual Japan experience). Like you said, if you see 10 different Roman churches in one day, the Sistine Chapel becomes just another fresco.

mutagen 5y ago

Yes, my first visit to the Met in NYC really opened my eyes to how impressive these works are in person and how much a photo on a screen does not convey. Not just the masters, but some of the portraits of people I've never heard of and by relatively unknown artists in styles I didn't particularly appreciate.

vmception 5y ago

Same, in a similar note I’ve been a big fan of Alphonse Mucha and Art Nouveau all my life and I had no idea that he used gold paint! Having seen so many jpegs and pictures in books of his works, it did not convey or describe this at all! I passed one in a gallery one time (not looking for one) and the sheen from the lights reflecting totally changed everything in a more amazing way!

modeless 5y ago
An RGB value per pixel is not all of the information you need to render a painting accurately! To capture the effect you describe, paintings should be scanned with something that can capture a BDRF. Then viewing them in VR could give a very accurate experience.
- baq 5y ago
  i had to google BDRF: Bidirectional reflectance distribution function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_distribution_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_reflectance_dist...
  - amelius 5y ago
    Shouldn't that include the color spectrum, and perhaps the polarization of the light?
    - modeless 5y ago
      Yes, if you want to go all the way. There are many simplified formulations of BDRFs that are commonly used that ignore polarization and even wavelength dependent effects (e.g. metallic/roughness used in physically based rendering for games which has only two parameters on top of the base color), but they would still be a huge improvement over not capturing any BDRF data at all.
- deleted 5y ago
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mod50ack 5y ago

Never been to Amsterdam, but I felt the same way at other major art museums. Although I think the best aspect of going to a museum is not necessarily seeing the most popular painting. For instance, when I went to the Louvre, which --- and I say this as a person who is not a huge fan of tourist traps --- is one of the best things to visit in Paris, of course there are the most famous works (e.g., the Mona Lisa), which are good (don't get me wrong on this), but 90% of the stuff in the museum is not really being looked at closely by everyone. One of the best things about a really big museum is just going and looking at art that you never knew about before. Just taking a closer look at pieces and getting a new new favorites. I took a few notes when I was visiting! Side note on going to the Louvre. I went last summer and, thanks to Covid, had to reserve my (free --- thanks EU!) spot (which I did only a few hours before). As a result, getting into the museum was very quick. Surely, this had to do with the reduced number of people in Paris, too, but I now think that entrance by reservation is a pretty good system generally for such popular spots.

inglor_cz 5y ago
Prado in Madrid is an interesting place to visit too. Most of the religious art didn't resonate with me, some other pieces more, but Goya - Goya was from another world. I am not sure how many talents comparable to Goya ever walked the Earth.
mabub24 5y ago
The Louvre is one of the few places where I actually felt like I could get lost in a building. It simply goes on forever. The sheer amount of works, objects, and information, presented to a visitor is astounding and hypnotic. For modern paintings, I like the Musee d'Orsay slightly more; but for sheer art history the Louvre is truly one of the greatest institutions in existence and a must visit for anyone. They will recommend that you plan on not "seeing everything" in a lot of guides. Believe that. Making some choices for things you want to see beforehand will cut down on the exhaustion that often comes over you after you end up in a room filled with dazzling tea cups from 16th century France and yet you're just desperately trying to figure out how to get out. It happens to the best of us.

DonHopkins 5y ago

Paul Debevec created the Light Stage to capture high dynamic range reflectance fields (including clean high resolution normal/bump/gloss/texture maps) of human faces. It uses hundreds polarized LED lights and cameras, plus lots of image processing, to separate the lighting effects of specular reflectance (glossy shine) from subsurface scattering (glowing skin), so you can reconstruct the 3D image and relight it under different conditions, environments, and viewing angles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Debevec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Debevec https://www.pauldebevec.com/ https://www.pauldebevec.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_stage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_stage "The Light Stage With Paul Debevec" - 360 Video (captured with JauntVR panoramic camera): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xujwI4dimDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xujwI4dimDA Digitizing Photorealistic Humans Inside USC's Light Stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6QJT5CXl3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6QJT5CXl3o Paul Debevec: Light Fields, Light Stages, and the Future of Virtual Production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAe2dUJxe3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAe2dUJxe3w A Light Stage was featured in the 2013 film "The Congress", which is a 2013 film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's book, "The Futurological Congress", directed by Ari Folman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress I really love that movie and the book it was based on, which both raised some interesting issues: Like Blade Runner's relationship to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, it was a lot different than the book, but shares some deep ideas, and stands on its own as a great movie. The Congress Official Trailer (2014) Robin Wright, Jon Hamm HD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rNSTizOsws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rNSTizOsws The scan scene in the Light Stage at USC ICT's motion capture studio was emotionally riveting and technically realistic, with Robin Wright playing a partially fictionalized version of herself, with Harvey Keitel playing her agent, baring her face and soul to the sparkling panoptic all encompassing emotion capturing machine. The Congress (2013) Scan Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8 "Rouen Revisited" is an earlier interactive kiosk project that Paul Debevec and Golan Levin created in 1996 at Interval Research Corporation, based on photogrammetric modeling techniques he developed at UCB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao3kf0YQ31c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao3kf0YQ31c https://acg.media.mit.edu/people/golan/rouen/ https://acg.media.mit.edu/people/golan/rouen/ >Between 1892 and 1894, the French Impressionist Claude Monet produced nearly 30 oil paintings of the main façade of the Rouen Cathedral in Normandy. Fascinated by the play of light and atmosphere over the Gothic church, Monet systematically painted the cathedral at different times of day, from slightly different angles, and in varied weather conditions. Each painting, quickly executed, offers a glimpse into a narrow slice of time and mood. We are interested in widening these slices, extending and connecting the dots occupied by Monet's paintings in the multidimensional space of turn-of-the-century Rouen. In Rouen Revisited, we present an interactive kiosk in which users are invited to explore the façade of the Rouen Cathedral, as Monet might have painted it, from any angle, time of day, and degree of atmospheric haze. Users can contrast these re-rendered paintings with similar views synthesized from century-old archival photographs, as well as from recent photographs that reveal the scars of a century of weathering and war. >Rouen Revisited is our homage to the hundredth anniversary of Monet's cathedral paintings. Like Monet's series, our installation is a constellation of impressions, a document of moments and percepts played out over space and time. In our homage, we extend the scope of Monet's study to where he could not go, bringing forth his object of fascination from a hundred feet in the air and across a hundred years of history. Here's a paper about "Multifocus HDR VIS/NIR hyperspectral imaging and its application to works of art" that references his work, about how you can capture the 3D texture and hyperspectral reflectance field of artwork in a way that you could dynamically relight in different conditions and environments, interactively view in VR, use in high quality computer games and renderings, etc: https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-27-8-11323&id=408878 https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-27-8-11... >Multifocus HDR VIS/NIR hyperspectral imaging and its application to works of art >Abstract: This paper presents a complete framework for capturing and processing hyperspectral reflectance images of artworks in situ, using a hyperspectral line scanner. These capturing systems are commonly used in laboratory conditions synchronized with scanning stages specifically designed for planar surfaces. However, when the intended application domain does not allow for image capture in these controlled conditions, achieving useful spectral reflectance image data can be a very challenging task (due to uncontrolled illumination, high-dynamic range (HDR) conditions in the scene, and the influence of chromatic aberration on the image quality, among other factors). We show, for the first time, all the necessary steps in the image capturing and post-processing in order to obtain high-quality HDR-based reflectance in the visible and near infrared, directly from the data captured by using a hyperspectral line scanner coupled to a rotating tripod. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms the normal capturing process in terms of dynamic range, color and spectral accuracy. To demonstrate the potential interest of this processing strategy for on-site analysis of artworks, we applied it to the study of a vintage copy of the famous painting “Transfiguration” by Raphael, as well as a facsimile of “The Golden Haggadah” from the British Library of London. The second piece has been studied for the identification of highly reflective gold-foil covered areas. [...] >5. Conclusions and future work: In this study, a complete framework is introduced for the hyperspectral reflectance capture of a painting in situ, and under high dynamic range conditions. Both the high dynamic range and the focusing problem due to chromatic aberrations have been overcome by using multiple captures with different focus positions and exposure times. A final hyperspectral reflectance cube has been computed using weighting maps calculated for both sample and flat fields and the quality of this cube has been tested and compared with a spectral cube captured in the usual LDR and single focus way. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms the best low dynamic range capture acquired. The sharpness index, as well as the color and spectral metrics show that it is possible to achieve good quality spectral reflectance images using a hyperspectral scanner in non-controlled illumination conditions. Moreover, as an example application, highly reflective golden material has been segmented from a facsimile. Our results show that by applying the proposed framework for capturing and processing, those areas which saturate the sensor in the usual capturingway, can be correctly exposed and segmented using the HDR multifocus capture. In future research, a new version of this framework will be developed including piecewise cube stitching for blending different cubes captured in different regions of big paintings. This will allow us to get closer to the painting and retrieve higher spatial resolution data, whilst still maintaining the spectral resolution and performance achieved in this study. Moreover, we will use the spectral reflectance images computed in this study, together with X-ray fluorescence measurements for the non-invasive pigment identification, in order to help the dating of ancient paintings and other works of art. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging

NamTaf 5y ago

I noticed this most vividly when seeing Van Gogh's Sunflowers (the 4th, from the National Gallery in London). A high-res scan such as on Wikipedia [1] does no justice to just how textured the painting is. He's clearly applied quite thick strokes and, under proper lighting, the texture really pops in a way that screens simply cannot reproduce. It brings an entirely new dimension (pun intended) to the painting and really changes the whole expeirence. Proper, museum/gallery lighting really transforms art in a way that even prosumer screens simply cannot replicate, because you can move around the piece and the interplay of light against it does so much. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflowers_(Van_Gogh_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflowers_(Van_Gogh_series)

joseluis 5y ago
I'd love to see a dynamic raytracing of a high resolution 3d scan of this picture or another masterpiece. I doubt nobody has attempted to do this before.
mabub24 5y ago
Many of Van Gogh's, when seen in person, are almost more like relief sculptures because of the incredible depth of his strokes. I loved going right to the sides of the frames and looking across the paintings to see how each little valley in his strokes caught the light and cast tiny shadows. I think it's also what adds a lot to the kaleidoscopic feel of his works, alongside his color palettes and stroke work; the extra dimension makes his paintings vibrate with restrained energy in interplay with the surrounding light.
- derbOac 5y ago
  My daughter and I went to an art supply store in December and we were surprised at the variety of paint bases. I had no idea. Many of them would be mistaken for sculptural material, almost like play doh or some like that, if you didn't know what they were. I had no idea.
wil421 5y ago
The Neue Pinakothek in Munich had a sunflower painting and I noticed the same thing. The textures really pop and there’s so much paint it is protruding from the canvas.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

Extremely relevant to this is the excellent program Ways of Seeing by John Berger: https://youtu.be/0pDE4VX_9Kk https://youtu.be/0pDE4VX_9Kk

shever73 5y ago

I had exactly the same experience when I saw Caravaggio's "The Taking of Christ" in person recently. I was familiar with the image, but I was blown away by how incredible the painting really is.

biorach 5y ago
Agreed - photos diminish it - nothing can capture the intensity of the original.

pkcsecurity 5y ago

I think part of that is the architecture and environment of the museum. They spend tons of attention to the high ceilings, sense of awe (a bit like a cathedral), and that can make all the difference compared to viewing something in your bedroom in the dark.

sycren 5y ago

Is there any distortion/difference seeing the painting in real-life at an off-angle that cannot be replicated through current scans? And are there any neurological studies about seeing/feeling physical objects versus virtual? And would VR help close the gap?