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717 Gigapixel Image of Rembrandt's Nightwatch

(hyper-resolution.org)
565 points gaws | 4 comments | 25 Jan 22 00:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.744s | source
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biesnecker ◴[25 Jan 22 01:17 UTC] No.30066616[source]▶
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.

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bitexploder ◴[25 Jan 22 02:35 UTC] No.30067178[source]▶
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.
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skhr0680 ◴[25 Jan 22 03:28 UTC] No.30067563[source]▶
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
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1. bsenftner ◴[25 Jan 22 04:04 UTC] No.30067847[source]▶
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.
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2. DonHopkins ◴[25 Jan 22 08:23 UTC] No.30069518[source]▶
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

3. duckmysick ◴[25 Jan 22 09:13 UTC] No.30069847[source]▶
Sounds really interesting. Is this still available somewhere?
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4. bsenftner ◴[25 Jan 22 14:08 UTC] No.30071907[source]▶
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.