717 Gigapixel Image of Rembrandt's Nightwatch

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Scanning and Printing a 3D Portrait of President Barack Obama:

https://vgl.ict.usc.edu/Research/PresidentialPortrait/

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.

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/NeWS

Sounds really interesting. Is this still available somewhere?

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.

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.

In a past life in philosophy, a professor of mine worked in aesthetics, and specifically wrote on the significance of genuineness or authenticity, and its special connection to the sense of touch. I don't remember it well but your remarks reminded me of it. Here is a review which summarizes it: <https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/things-in-touch-with-the-past/>

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'.