Google Revamps Arts & Culture App; Adds Cardboard VR Support and Art Recognizer

Art seems to be the flavour of the season as following the popularity wave of photo-filter app Prisma, Google has decided to give a fresh round of updates to its Arts & Culture app that will allow you to experience artworks around the world and appreciate their intricacy while sitting in your living room.

With the new revamp of its Art & Culture app and website, Google has provided Cardboard support to the app and made it much easier to browse through the artworks on mobile devices, while being immersed in a virtual reality. The app allows users to filter searches by artist, colour, museum, art styles, and more - a vast improvement over the original app that was essentially a Chrome wrapper over the Google Cultural Institute website.

The search giant has also added a feature called 'Art Recognizer' that would allow you to get information about a particular artwork just by pointing your phone's camera towards the artwork. However, this feature is only available for selective list of museums that includes Washington DC's National Gallery of Art and London's Dulwich Picture Gallery.

The update will be coming to both Android and iOS.

In a separate press statement for India, Duncan Osborn, Product Manager, Google Cultural Institute, said, "We are sure people want to see some of the artworks in real life too-and the Google Arts & Culture app is here to help. The app helps art lovers take a walk through these famous museums and artefacts from world over offering them a rich immersive experience."

The company also announced that a virtual tour is now possible of New Delhi's Sanskriti Museum, which is said to be home to one of the largest collections of Indian art and crafts.

The Cardboard support will make the app much more immersive and can prove to be extremely beneficial for students of art who cannot afford to physically go to each and every museum that is available on this app.

In January this year, Google Cultural Institute, the company's ambitious effort to bring artwork from around the world to the Web, added Mumbai's oldest museum Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum to its digital collection.

Last month, The Verge reported that the company has been able to drastically increase the number of artworks that it scanned in super-high-resolution gigapixel images thanks to a new camera called Art Camera.