That said, this image is amazing, and lets you see a lot more detail than you can easily manage at the museum.
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.
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.htm...
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.
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!
Having said that, before visiting the Sistine Chapel, I had indeed studied the imagery on my computer, poring over many of the details ahead of time. I knew that giving my brain some time to ingest, digest, and comprehend the enormity of what I was about to see would be beneficial. And I suppose in much the same way you studied the streets of a Japanese city, I had a similar experience with the Sistine Chapel.
And perhaps here's my somewhat contrarian point to your contrarian point... :-) Seeing it in person lit up the right side of my brain whereas the virtual tour on the computer was more of a left-brained experience. Standing in the same room Michaelangelo stood (and lay on his back) for four years was indescribable. The light that bounced off that ceiling and into my eyes was different than the light emitted from my computer's LCD monitor. Visually exploring it with my 12-year-old daughter and sharing it through her eyes was great. It was a fantastic experience, one I will always treasure. I hope to see it again someday.
They have weeks off of work and expect you to as well. They don't save up for 5 day trips across 3 day weekends to rush rush rush. They* just dip out and live in the different place for a while, take classes, get to know locals, etc. (*not everywhere has this privilege, but it is very common)
I’m never going back to the other way I just hang out with richer Americans. More people have been doing something equivalent over the last year, they're usually also richer Americans just still career focused as well, compared to trust funders.
Makes me think I should look it up more, because I absolutely did not.
Some parts were crowded, other parts were not, I enjoyed the art but hmmm. To me the Swiss Guard tradition was more interesting and fascinating, and some of the graves had fascinating designs on them.
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.
I'm not saying anyone should agree with me. Only that I don't find it shocking if some people say the Sistine Chapel didn't trigger any strong lasting memories.
Mona Lisa? Good luck even looking at it if you're short, unless you want to be stuck with your face in someone's armpit while they are taking a selfie.
Lol this is not very common at all. You thinking that's common tells me you don't actually know how normal people from European countries actually live. Might be helpful to actually meet these "locals" that you talk about.
The Sistine Chapel experience, for instance, aside from being just a mass of people being shuffled through one of the largest tourist draws in the world, was on a day that started with incidentally seeing Pope JP2 give an address, and ended with seeing the Dalai Lama at Tivoli when going there for a dinner (two spiritual leaders in one day! Yet I remain an agnostic). In the end the Chapel got filed away as "neat some stuff painted on a ceiling". That is an extreme example, but for my "a 100 year old is historic" North American sensibilities, virtually everything in places like Belgium, France and Italy is overwhelming, from the weird little waffle shop in Ypres to the sound of bells, the stones on the street, etc, everything just becomes an onslaught of overwhelming experience.
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.
Quite a lot of fine art in Venice isn't in crowded museums; some of it's in little churches, away from the crowds, and some is in smaller private museums, away from the day-tripper trail.
I've never been to Florence. I hear that's overwhelming.
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.
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/Light_stage
"The Light Stage With Paul Debevec" - 360 Video (captured with JauntVR panoramic camera):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xujwI4dimDA
Digitizing Photorealistic Humans Inside USC's Light Stage:
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
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_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
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
"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://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-27-8-11...
>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.
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)
Much more common is boarding a low cost flight on Friday night or Saturday morning, flying between 60 to 120 minutes and coming back on Sunday night. Add to that a two/three weeks vacation once per year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069100
Scanning and Printing a 3D Portrait of President Barack Obama:
I also remember being disgusted at the vast, obscene wealth that the Vatican has amassed and regretting giving them more money.
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.
I remember hearing about the Sony News Unix workstation, and being dismayed that it didn't run Sun's NeWS window system. ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069100
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
>[...] 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. [...]
>[...] 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. [...]
>4.3. Additional example of application: identification of golden foil in a facsimile As a final experiment, an original facsimile from the British Library of London has been captured using the proposed framework. This facsimile (see Fig. 8), presents areas of golden highly reflective material. These kinds of materials always represent a challenge for image capturing systems. The problem is that depending on the illumination/observation geometry, the capturing device may receive specular reflections from the sample. If this happens, these areas would most probably saturate the sensor when using the exposure times needed to correctly capture the rest of the scene. Even if the illumination could be controlled, if the samples are not perfectly flat (as is the case in many artworks and illuminated manuscripts which have irregular texture), avoiding the saturated areas would not be possible by only manipulating the light sources. Therefore, even in controlled illumination laboratory conditions, the high dynamic range may still be a problem for this kind of samples. As in previous sections with the art painting, two spectral reflectance cubes of the facsimile were captured (one LDR and one HDR). These cubes were used for the automatic detection of those areas of the facsimile containing the highly reflective golden material. For such a purpose, the best results were found using the spectral metric goodness of fit coefficient (GFC) in both cases, in the near infrared spectral range from 700 to 1000 nm. The segmentations of the HDR and LDR cubes were compared with a manually segmented ground truth (shown in 8 center of bottom row). Since there are only two possible labels for each pixel (0 for non-golden material and 1 for golden material), the performance was compared as the percentage of matches between the automatic segmentations and the ground truth. [...]
>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/Bidirectional_reflectance_dist...
Didn't even go up the Eiffel tower because I didn't feel like waiting in line.
I enjoyed travelling this way. But I admit it's probably easier without a family to accommodate.
There are (working) people who move to another place for many weeks but the vast majority of us does weekend tourism and 2 or 3 weeks vacations. Companies are not particularly keen to let one person go for 4 o 5 weeks. My personal experience when I was not self employed is that they don't like even 3 weeks in a single stint. The two longest vacations I had were one month long after I went self employed (hi Australia!)
I expect that working from home will make staying abroad for a long term more common, but it costs more money that staying at home (you're probably still paying a rent or mortgage) and it's usually not for families.
JFYI, Stendhal Syndrome (the term was born in Florence, by a psychoilogist that observed cases among tourists):
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/stendhal-syndrome-...
Not really-really proved to be an actual illness, and not common, still ...
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.
An excerpt: > Touch is often practically impossible for ordinary viewers of many genuine specimens of very valuable things, such as a Gutenberg Bible or Michelangelo's David. Protected as they often are by glass encasings, barriers and surveillance technology, these objects are for the most part currently only sensorily accessible through vision.
> However, Korsmeyer rejoins, the sense of touch is still at work given the viewers' physical closeness to these objects and the subsequent in-principle possibility of touching them. Korsmeyer's connection between touch and genuineness explicitly resonates with recent claims about the role of contagion in experiences of the authentic. Cognitive scientists Paul Bloom and George Newman, among others, have argued that our valuing authenticity in objects is explained by our implicitly accepting a magical law of contagion (see, e.g., Newman and Bloom 2012). According to such a law, desirable or odious qualities can be transmitted by contact. So, for example, the value that we attribute to the original David kept in the Gallery of the Academy of Florence (and that we do not attribute to the 20th century copy currently visible in the Piazza della Signoria) is explained by the possibility of touching an object that Michelangelo himself touched. Korsmeyer refers to this feature of our implicit reasoning patterns as 'the transitivity of touch'.
And are there any neurological studies about seeing/feeling physical objects versus virtual? And would VR help close the gap?