This is incredibly cool. It's been a while since I felt this inspired by something on HN. Congratulations on the idea and the implementation!
I genuinely think there's an opportunity for someone (yourself, or someone else) to turn this into a genuinely social experience, a modern museum platform.
I'd love to see people's avatars walking around in some suitably tasteful way, with general info on location/age/sex/occupation. Be able to indicate if you're open to chatting.
Work with actual art historians to give prerecorded virtual tours that start every hour or something, so you can be part of a group following around.
There's something special about the museum experience, and the idea of virtualizing it in a way that makes it accessible to everyone, just through your browser rather than VR goggles, feels somehow a little bit magic.
Let people curate their own wing layouts and architecture and own art selection and where each painting gets hung. Have leaderboards of the most popular ones, and each wing can build doors that transition to other selected wings.
I genuinely think something like this could become "the" virtual museum, the same way Wikipedia is "the" electronic encyclopedia. It's just such a fundamentally different experience from how you currently browse museum's collections electronically.
But I do note that it's pulling the images from Wikipedia's servers directly. That feels like it could be pretty bad for Wikipedia's bandwidth. I think I'd feel more comfortable if the art was cached by artfrompixels.com itself, where licensing allows. (And I imagine that for a lot of it there'll be no issue.)
The bug: When you zoom on the timeline, the zoom should keep the point under the cursor fixed, for instance if I zoom on Cubism, the Chinese painting section will expand, pushing the section I intended to zoom down, so I'll have to pan to that section.
The suggestion: A map, with a brushable timeline to locate in space and time where an artist produced their art.
What is strange is that last year I spent a lot of time creating the exact same 3D gallery experience with Claude. I picked up the style of the lights, the benches, the walls, the cards position. I also added music, lights on top of the images and the exact tour experience.
A year later, I see a very similar implementation!...I find that very odd.
But I do like the experience and site, there are few things I can pick from it myself for the project I've.
But it seems to me anything you use Claude for will be used aggressively to train the next model and some else in same prompting space can recreate it.
Not take the anything from the author's work, mine was in a slightly different context.
Indeed i have seen the concept on youtube back in the days. Also what you saying I agree too, about big LLMs that are trained on others people work (i.e. math). it started as single prompt so the model did its own work with a hight probability of using others people work, after that i worked a lot on this. In the future I am sure that i will use my work too.
Nevertheless, I have gathered many ideas from the comments. if you are interested we can cooperate on the project. its a project out of pure interest exporing on more ways to ingest/spread knowledge.
This is super cool and I look forward to sharing with my art friends. One piece of unsolicited feedback: it is really nice to focus on a particular image in the gallery, but when I'm done, it puts me back in normal cursor mode and I have to click to 'step inside' again. Minor annoyance. Otherwise really neat.
This is an awesome project. It could bring the art museum experience to those that can't travel to museums.
But it is missing so many artists and art movements. A better choice of source material and way more artists can be found on wikiart.org [0]. Maybe the creator could merge scraping efforts?
This most likely does not pull directly from Wikipedia. Wikipedia has rate limits on how much you can link to them. It looks like they are storing the images as a cache in the cloud. Then they are loading them into the individual rooms. There are some systems that allow multi user experiences. For example, there is the Uncensored Library in Minecraft which houses a variety of texts which multiple people can be in at once. You could easily put avatars in this which could walk around inside the museum. In my own project, I have an avatar which walks around in a 3D environment with books. I like the way this is laid out. This looks like a MVP right now. It probably will have many iterations.
Not ATM ! Thinking of curating more the content and also add an audioguide about the life of each painter as well as some details when you come close to famous paintings. But a nice idea, but it would need better resolution of the paintings (not possible atm since are from wikipedia).
Did you find any issues with performance in such a large dataset (like "all artists") with such dynamic rendering (specifically for the timeline view)?
Does this use a library for plotting everything on the timeline or is it coded from scratch?
hehe i know right, i was waiting for this! this is supposed to be for educational purposes, but since you want a bit of fun to press P on your keyboard and for password do Vandalism0
Very cool! What stood out is there seems to be a canvas pattern added to the images, which the original don't have. I get it adds a nice touch of lighting but I'd prefer to switch that off to see the image without modifications. Great work!
At some museums you can hire an art history expert as a guide. In addition to learning the basics (era, artist, etc...) you also find out what's important about any particular piece. They tell you what came before or after the painting or sculpture. You find out who was working with whom. Does the piece have an interesting backstory? Questionable provenance? What was the cultural or political environment at the time?
This does have a little blurb as you enter different galleries, but it's pretty broad. It would be neat to have more details per work.
I really wish I had taken an art history course when I was in school...
And it's heartbreaking to see the low resolution. I hope the author will explore the large catalogs of high resolution public domain/CC0 images available.
Because the core implementation is really, really nice. I just want to look much more closely.
Paris Musées, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum are some sources I can think of - there are more, I'm sure.
And I _wish_ the super-high rez ones at https://artsandculture.google.com/ would fall on that list too, but I guess that's not the case.
1) Please add a walk speed setting. The current setting feels too fast for a museum environment. The joy of seeing a piece out of the corner of your eye and delayed satisfaction of making your way over to it in a real museum could be captured.
2) Instead of a long endless hallway, please ask it study the layout of museums and implement some of the features. Getting "lost" in a museum is one of the great joys. You end up in a wing that you may otherwise have never been interested in.
Very cool, would love to experience (ultra) high resolution presentations of the art. I was the kid that always got scolded by putting my nose up to the cavas to see the brush strokes..
It would be great to add curated exhibitions alongside the single-artist retrospectives: rooms mixing works by several artists, the way a museum curator would assemble a show.
I remember that art galleries used to be the best thing in Second Life.
Seeing things in a walkable space was incredibly different than browsing a website. There is something quite palpable about it.
I think Google Arts Project would let you navigate real rooms in museums and zoom in on the painting.
I kind of dislike that this website only allows you to browse one artist at a time, and then you have to back to the timeline. It would be a lot better if it was a fully walkable museum.
feels like with all these edutainment demos that AI is enabling that i'm back playing with Encarta as a kid. Good work.
It's a shame that the real-world-metaphor computer stuff fell out of favor. microsoft bob, etc. It's not that efficient but it's so well self-explained ; to see more art you walk around a museum; who'da thought.
Just the other day I was thinking about creating something similar as a personal project, but I never thought of making the museum experience this immersive. Congrats! Time well spent and a nice use of AI for educational, artistic and historical purpose.
Nice, works surprisingly well on mobile (iOS Firefox). It’s be nice if the UI was a little less intrusive, I have a smaller phone and it takes up a lot of the screen. Maybe just a toggle for UI visibility?
nice maybe rooms designed not just from a generic historical period but themed from the painters specific life moments / or specific era? will work on that, thank you
every artist every work under one roof! audioguide regarding their life and some specific details when come close to a famous painting, indeed sounds nice.
I agree! thinking of going beyond art to include national history. Being Greek, I plan to try Greek history next. Again a museum with paintings sculptures docuemntaty videos transcripts etc.
This is incredibly cool. It's been a while since I felt this inspired by something on HN. Congratulations on the idea and the implementation!
I genuinely think there's an opportunity for someone (yourself, or someone else) to turn this into a genuinely social experience, a modern museum platform.
I'd love to see people's avatars walking around in some suitably tasteful way, with general info on location/age/sex/occupation. Be able to indicate if you're open to chatting.
Work with actual art historians to give prerecorded virtual tours that start every hour or something, so you can be part of a group following around.
There's something special about the museum experience, and the idea of virtualizing it in a way that makes it accessible to everyone, just through your browser rather than VR goggles, feels somehow a little bit magic.
Let people curate their own wing layouts and architecture and own art selection and where each painting gets hung. Have leaderboards of the most popular ones, and each wing can build doors that transition to other selected wings.
I genuinely think something like this could become "the" virtual museum, the same way Wikipedia is "the" electronic encyclopedia. It's just such a fundamentally different experience from how you currently browse museum's collections electronically.
wow thank you for the business plan!!!!!!!!!
It's so genuinely load-bearing it hurts. And thats where it shapes the paradigm in a very real way.
It's a real shame when genuine enthusiasm gets mistaken for AI.
This looks incredibly cool!
But I do note that it's pulling the images from Wikipedia's servers directly. That feels like it could be pretty bad for Wikipedia's bandwidth. I think I'd feel more comfortable if the art was cached by artfrompixels.com itself, where licensing allows. (And I imagine that for a lot of it there'll be no issue.)
Nice catch. It on schedule, to host them ! ty. next version will include all proposals as well as a postgres and a data lake.
Nice project, a bug and some suggestions:
The bug: When you zoom on the timeline, the zoom should keep the point under the cursor fixed, for instance if I zoom on Cubism, the Chinese painting section will expand, pushing the section I intended to zoom down, so I'll have to pan to that section.
The suggestion: A map, with a brushable timeline to locate in space and time where an artist produced their art.
What is strange is that last year I spent a lot of time creating the exact same 3D gallery experience with Claude. I picked up the style of the lights, the benches, the walls, the cards position. I also added music, lights on top of the images and the exact tour experience.
A year later, I see a very similar implementation!...I find that very odd.
But I do like the experience and site, there are few things I can pick from it myself for the project I've.
But it seems to me anything you use Claude for will be used aggressively to train the next model and some else in same prompting space can recreate it.
Not take the anything from the author's work, mine was in a slightly different context.
Indeed i have seen the concept on youtube back in the days. Also what you saying I agree too, about big LLMs that are trained on others people work (i.e. math). it started as single prompt so the model did its own work with a hight probability of using others people work, after that i worked a lot on this. In the future I am sure that i will use my work too.
Nevertheless, I have gathered many ideas from the comments. if you are interested we can cooperate on the project. its a project out of pure interest exporing on more ways to ingest/spread knowledge.
I mean, i think the more likely explanation is that claude created both, and you are overestimating how unique the prompts you gave claude were.
It might be true - I don't recall exactly how much was my contribution, it was a year ago. I do remember iterating a lot.
I just find it how interesting we ended up with very similar design despite the iterations I had.
I dont disagree! The important thing is what happens next after the prompts.
This is super cool and I look forward to sharing with my art friends. One piece of unsolicited feedback: it is really nice to focus on a particular image in the gallery, but when I'm done, it puts me back in normal cursor mode and I have to click to 'step inside' again. Minor annoyance. Otherwise really neat.
noted!ty
This is an awesome project. It could bring the art museum experience to those that can't travel to museums.
But it is missing so many artists and art movements. A better choice of source material and way more artists can be found on wikiart.org [0]. Maybe the creator could merge scraping efforts?
[0] wikiart.org.
wow i want not aware wikiart.org. indeed a better source ! since i have the infra i will include that too!! thank you a lot!!!
this is a truly beautiful implementation. great job!
This most likely does not pull directly from Wikipedia. Wikipedia has rate limits on how much you can link to them. It looks like they are storing the images as a cache in the cloud. Then they are loading them into the individual rooms. There are some systems that allow multi user experiences. For example, there is the Uncensored Library in Minecraft which houses a variety of texts which multiple people can be in at once. You could easily put avatars in this which could walk around inside the museum. In my own project, I have an avatar which walks around in a 3D environment with books. I like the way this is laid out. This looks like a MVP right now. It probably will have many iterations.
Great project! Any plans to support VR?
Not ATM ! Thinking of curating more the content and also add an audioguide about the life of each painter as well as some details when you come close to famous paintings. But a nice idea, but it would need better resolution of the paintings (not possible atm since are from wikipedia).
You miiiight be able to get away with WebXR with graceful fallback
Did you find any issues with performance in such a large dataset (like "all artists") with such dynamic rendering (specifically for the timeline view)?
Does this use a library for plotting everything on the timeline or is it coded from scratch?
EDIT: I see now the code is at https://github.com/justdataplease/art-history-museum
Very cool, but I can't seem to jump up onto the benches, even with crouch jumping.
hehe i know right, i was waiting for this! this is supposed to be for educational purposes, but since you want a bit of fun to press P on your keyboard and for password do Vandalism0
Very cool! What stood out is there seems to be a canvas pattern added to the images, which the original don't have. I get it adds a nice touch of lighting but I'd prefer to switch that off to see the image without modifications. Great work!
At some museums you can hire an art history expert as a guide. In addition to learning the basics (era, artist, etc...) you also find out what's important about any particular piece. They tell you what came before or after the painting or sculpture. You find out who was working with whom. Does the piece have an interesting backstory? Questionable provenance? What was the cultural or political environment at the time?
This does have a little blurb as you enter different galleries, but it's pretty broad. It would be neat to have more details per work.
I really wish I had taken an art history course when I was in school...
very nice! i will organize all suggestions for the next version! ty
It's amazing.
And it's heartbreaking to see the low resolution. I hope the author will explore the large catalogs of high resolution public domain/CC0 images available.
Because the core implementation is really, really nice. I just want to look much more closely.
Paris Musées, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum are some sources I can think of - there are more, I'm sure.
And I _wish_ the super-high rez ones at https://artsandculture.google.com/ would fall on that list too, but I guess that's not the case.
very nice will look into it for the next version!
So cool and inspiring.
1) Please add a walk speed setting. The current setting feels too fast for a museum environment. The joy of seeing a piece out of the corner of your eye and delayed satisfaction of making your way over to it in a real museum could be captured.
2) Instead of a long endless hallway, please ask it study the layout of museums and implement some of the features. Getting "lost" in a museum is one of the great joys. You end up in a wing that you may otherwise have never been interested in.
Very cool, would love to experience (ultra) high resolution presentations of the art. I was the kid that always got scolded by putting my nose up to the cavas to see the brush strokes..
Easily done if you leverage https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/stories/operation-night-watch/... - sure there are loads more museums that offer such a service now too.
yes!!! interesting atm the media is sourced directly from wikipedia. will look into it!
IIIF is your friend here. Many museums / art galleries publish their manifests - example, Science Museum London → https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co6997/...
It would be great to add curated exhibitions alongside the single-artist retrospectives: rooms mixing works by several artists, the way a museum curator would assemble a show.
really nice idea working on this next. Thank you!!
I remember that art galleries used to be the best thing in Second Life.
Seeing things in a walkable space was incredibly different than browsing a website. There is something quite palpable about it.
I think Google Arts Project would let you navigate real rooms in museums and zoom in on the painting.
I kind of dislike that this website only allows you to browse one artist at a time, and then you have to back to the timeline. It would be a lot better if it was a fully walkable museum.
Just my opinion.
Agree on the museum sources, and the bit worth adding is most of them serve IIIF so you can pull deep zoom tiles instead of one huge texture.
IIIF i did not know very interesting. will look into it!!! ty
feels like with all these edutainment demos that AI is enabling that i'm back playing with Encarta as a kid. Good work.
It's a shame that the real-world-metaphor computer stuff fell out of favor. microsoft bob, etc. It's not that efficient but it's so well self-explained ; to see more art you walk around a museum; who'da thought.
This is so fun! Love seeing a new way of engaging with a site that is just vertical scrolling and scrolling.
What inspired you to take on this concept? I'd be interested in learning more about how you built this, maybe a post!
This is very well done! Thank you. Spent a surprising amount of time looking at paintings. VR would be awesome.
Just the other day I was thinking about creating something similar as a personal project, but I never thought of making the museum experience this immersive. Congrats! Time well spent and a nice use of AI for educational, artistic and historical purpose.
The UI and UX design is inspiring! Goes to show that people can still be creative and innovative with website ideas in the AI age. Beautifully done.
Nice, works surprisingly well on mobile (iOS Firefox). It’s be nice if the UI was a little less intrusive, I have a smaller phone and it takes up a lot of the screen. Maybe just a toggle for UI visibility?
I would like a more curated version of this or a more 'hard room setup' because brains can remember things better with more context.
Going up to the xy ara or through a japanese space helps.
Nonetheless, nice expeirment.
nice maybe rooms designed not just from a generic historical period but themed from the painters specific life moments / or specific era? will work on that, thank you
Uh the history / growth of an artist, love it :)
Glorious. I've been waiting for this a long time.
ty!!!
Really well executed! Would love a (fuzzy) search to look for certain artists, additional filters, such as by-continent, by-country, etc.
There is Explore button where you can search but noted about more filters i will enchance it!
I was really surprised by this. Well done.
This is very, very well done. Thank you.
ty!
VERY impressed by the implementation, idea, and interface. Major kudos.
Very clean and elegant! A very pleasant experience to walk in!
nice! if you add also an audioguide it will complete the experience!
every artist every work under one roof! audioguide regarding their life and some specific details when come close to a famous painting, indeed sounds nice.
noted!
This is how I'd like to consume all my information
I agree! thinking of going beyond art to include national history. Being Greek, I plan to try Greek history next. Again a museum with paintings sculptures docuemntaty videos transcripts etc.
great experience! really good work
ty
Terrific
great execution of the idea!
beauty
lovely! thank you