Cornell Lab of Ornithology interactive is part of the show
Mountain View, CA & Ithaca, NY—A new online experience from Google, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and more than 1,000 other partner institutions is opening the doors to spectacular collections of natural history, all available in one place. Each collection is presented as an interactive, dynamic, and immersive experience, allowing visitors to discover nature's diversity and fragility in an unprecedented way at no cost.
This new online exhibition is available on g.co/naturalhistory and includes Our Feathered Planet,featuring the Cornell Lab's large-scale mural by artist Jane Kim. The mural's 3,000 square feet depict the diversity and evolution of birds. Each bird represents an existing bird family and is shown in its home range on a world map in life-sized detail.
"To bring this mural to life for online visitors from all over the world, we had to combine more than 750 photographs into a single image," explains Mya Thompson at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "Our Feathered Planet, gives viewers a guided tour of the mural and offers an insider's look at the artistic process. You'll get close enough to see the brush strokes and learn a lot about the birds at the same time."
The Google Cultural Institute online collection uses state-of-the-art technology to give a new virtual life to extinct animals and tell fascinating stories about our planet's evolution over billions of years. Viewers come face-to-face with Jurassic giants in 360-degree videos, giving a better sense of how these animals lived, and what it might have felt like to be in their presence.
Panoramic Street View imagery gives people a backstage pass to wander virtually around iconic venues such as London's Natural History Museum, the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin or the American Museum of Natural History. Visitors may also browse more than 100 fascinating stories related to dinosaurs and the world's most known fossils, in addition to learning about birds, plants, insects, and minerals on g.co/naturalhistory.
For this exhibition, natural history institutions from 15 countries created over a hundred interactive stories, sharing a total of 300,000 photos, videos, and other documents online in collaboration with Google. The latest innovations in tech help bring the magic of these legendary venues to life, and give everyone a chance to reconnect with our evolution story and our planet environment in all its richness.
The new online exhibition opens today at g.co/naturalhistory and is open for all online, for free on the web and through the new Google Arts & Culture mobile app on iOS and Android. You can watch all the 360-degree videos on YouTube.
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Contacts:
Pat Leonard, pel27@cornell.edu
Patrick Lenihan, Google Cultural Institute, lenihan@google.com
