THE WORLD’S FIRST GIGAPIXEL MUSEUM

From Thursday, 26th November, as well as being able to visit the Mauritshuis in The Hague in person, you will be able to experience it in a new lifelike virtual environment. The museum is the first in the world to have been fully digitised in gigapixel format*. By bringing this together with the Maurithuis’s existing Second Canvas app, the wonderful stories behind the masterpieces are now revealed in the highest resolution.  

Thanks to 360-degree gigapixel photography, the Mauritshuis’s museum rooms can now be explored in extremely high resolution, right down to the smallest details. There are also 36 masterpieces to enjoy, including all the Vermeers, four Rembrandts, three Jan Steens, Fabritius’s Goldfinch and The Bull by Paulus Potter. These are all accompanied by amazing stories that lead the visitor into the artwork, revealing hidden details. Some paintings even offer the option of switching between the photographic image and infrared images**. This allows visitors to swap between the different images and discover the changes that the artist made during the painting process.

The 360-degree virtual tour is available from 26th November via the Mauritshuis website (www.mauritshuis.nl) or the Second Canvas Mauritshuis app (via the AppStore or Google Play).

 

*  Gigapixel format is a gigapixel image of 1000 megapixels, more than 100 times the size of images that can be produced by a smartphone. Thanks to this high quality, a gigapixel image of an artwork offers a new experience of art (in the museum). Users can, as it were, touch the painting.
**  Infrared images reveal the painter’s original sketches that lie under the paint layers.
***  Madpixel is a tech company, creator of the super high resolution (gigapixel) digitization of artwork technology, and Second Canvas, the digital platform that combines gigapixel images of artworks with storytelling based on details of each piece.

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