The Google Art Project continues to expand

As you may know, Google employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time on their own ideas. As a result of this, Amit Sood came up with the idea of collecting artworks of museums all over the world on one single website. This resulted in the Google Art Project.

Since february 2011, Google is working on collecting high-resolution artworks from museums all over the world. At the moment, Google has partnerships with hundreds of museums that are eager to show their artworks online, including the MoMA, the Uffizi, the Hermitage and the Rijksmuseum. At the moment there are 49,020 items available, of which some are in ultra high resolution at about 10 billion pixels.

One popular feature of the website is “My galleries”, which allows the user to compose and share a personal set of art works of the website. Interestingly, visitors look at the works for an average time of one minute, which is three times as much as in actual museums, according to Google. In addition to this Art Project, the Google Cultural Institute is also working on the World Wonders project and Archive Exhibitions, that allows museums to make their (normally temporary) exhibitions available online.

You might ask yourself now: “what’s in it for Google?”. Fair question, as they do not display any advertisements or charge the museums or users. Google says: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Probably this idealistic project is good marketing and does not cost too much.

Similarly, the Italian Lamborghini Museum just opened their doors to Google. This museum will not be on show in the Art Project, but in Google Maps’ Street View, allowing you to “test the seats” by virtually taking place in the cars. The Art Project uses the same Street View engine to provide virtual tours through the partnering museums.

http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/
http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/10/14/op-je-computer-naar-het-lamborghini-museum-en-de-stoelen-testen/
http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/04/15/google-art-we-kijken-langer-naar-kunst-en-het-meest-naar-van-gogh/

Who ‘invented’ our phone button lay-out?

Ever wondered why your phone button lay-out looks like this? I certainly have not, as it seems very intuitive to me. Well, actually in the 1950s a group of researchers racked their brains about the optimal layout.

When the technology to replace the old rotary phone became available, they initially considered to just replace the holes (in which you ‘dragged’ the numbers) by buttons. However, the Bell Labs did some testing and found out that there were other ways to shape modern phones.

The image below shows the lay-outs that were considered in their article, published in the July 1960 issue of “The Bell System Technical Journal”. As you can see, they tested some pretty weird designs: a sort of bowling-pin formation (III-B), stairs (II-B), parts of circles and even a cross.

In their research, they just asked people to dial numbers on the different phones and measured the speed and the amount of errors. In fact, the original rotary phone button lay-out (VI-C) was the fastest and the lay-out with two vertical columns (IV-B) was tested with least errors.

However, the differences were not very large, so for engineering reasons, they chose a  3×3 grid. The calculator lay-out, which already was in use at that time, was tested slightly slower than the reversed one, and consequently, our current phone lay-out was created.

Sources:

-Deininger, R.L. (1960) ‘Human Factors Engineering Studies of the Design and Use of Pushbutton Telephone Sets’, Bell System Technical Journal, 39, 4: pp. 995-1012.
-Numberphile (http://www.numberphile.com/videos/keypad_layout.html)