Imagine: the Louvre, Wednesday, 11am, everybody’s in a hurry, slipping and crawling through the crowds to reach her. Every smartphone, iPad, and camera is waving in the air trying to get the “perfect” photo of the painting with no strangers in it. Poor results because the Mona Lisa doesn’t accept flash. Will they look at this picture again? Why would they want to? LTU got interested in this problem and wanted to see if an application could be developed that would allow us to create a virtual collection of artworks similar to what was done in FlashInvaders app. Such an application would allow us to recall artworks viewed, dates and location of the visit, and the option to get more information on the artwork. New technologies, especially image recognition, have a lot to offer to the art market and ecosystem.
Image recognition technology is clearly the best way of connecting the art world to the digital world. Collectrium allows art gallery visitors to get details on a work simply by taking pictures of it. Mobile users can then annotate a work or add it to their favorites, share it and contact the artist or his agent for more information. It’s an efficient app for collectors and art lovers.
Using image recognition, several online art retailers offer a unique navigation experience through an art collection by offering search capability by colors and similarity (shapes, shading, textures). Visual search in addition to traditional text search offers an important added value for the art sector.
Art.com, the world’s largest online retailer of high-quality wall art as well as Muzeo.fr use visual search to offer their visitors an easy access to pieces of art matching their living-room decoration or to find pictures similar to the one(s) spotted at a friend’s home.
Image recognition can also support stolen art investigations. Investigators can identify known stolen artifacts online via mobile image recognition or image search on global stolen art registries. OCBC (french police) uses LTU’s technology to manage and search into the database called “TREIMA” which contains images of art objects stolen in France.
Playful and frivolous, the augmented reality app ARART. By overlaying the camera of a mobile device onto a well-known masterpiece, the ARART-system detects images and objects that are registered and will display an animated image on top of said object - bringing paintings to life.
http://www.designboom.com/technology/arart-augmented-reality-app-brings-paintings-to-life/
For its part, Google allows users to select a museum from the 150 collections from 40 countries and discover masterpieces. Google Art Project.
Because everyone is now used to (if not dependent on) the “second screen”, it will undoubtedly now have its role in the world of art and in museums.