Jason Brush is executive vice president at Schematic, where he heads the User Experience group. In fact, Schematic was part of the development team that worked with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) to build the Google Art Project, an amazing tool that lets you see some of the world's greatest art and art museums in extremely high quality. 

The project required working closely with Google engineers and manipulating Google APIs and tools. We asked Brush what it was like to work on such a project and how the project team came together to solve all of the technical problems involved in such a complex project.

FCM: What was Schematic's role in the Google Art Project and how did you interact with the team at Google?

JB: Google Art Project is the product of a tight-knit collaboration between Schematic and a team within Google lead by Amit Sood, who first came up with the concept. Schematic was brought on board to design the interface and develop the client-side and server-side technology that powers the site, while the customized street-view and artwork viewers were built by engineers on the Google team. The Schematic and Google teams worked closely for nearly a year to create the site, working iteratively. 

FCM: How difficult was it to make all of the Google APIs interact to bring this project to life? How much customization and brute force was involved?

JB: The many Google APIs the site utilizes integrated smoothly, but one task that required a fair amount of brute force was mapping the location of artworks in Street View to their corresponding images in the "Microscope Viewer". There was really no way around this without a fair amount of manual labor, facilitated by a custom mapping tool we built for the site's CMS.

FCM: What are the differences involved in using Street View for this purpose, especially providing the ability to zoom into such a detailed level?

JB: The main difference we encountered was the challenge in placing links to artwork details precisely next to the paintings within the viewer. In standard Street View, overlays are much more forgiving. It's not a problem if labels fall over top of buildings; in fact, it's necessary. However, in Art Project, we had to avoid placing links on top of the paintings, and endeavored to make them appear in a consistent place vis-a-vis artwork.

The way that panoramas in Street View are stitched together presented some challenges in this precise placement, which required a lot of manual adjustment. Another challenge was coming up with a design for those links which made them clearly readable, without distracting from the gallery experience. Given the varied decor of galleries, we had to come up with a design system for those links which could be adjusted from gallery to gallery, in contrast to Street View's standardized head-up display designs.

FCM: The design team had to know that allowing people to see this level of artistic detail could have implications for the content owners--in this case the museums. Was this something that came up for discussion and how did you reconcile it?

JB: Schematic wasn't part of the discussions between the museums and Google regarding rights issues, so I can't comment on how they chose to balance the risk and benefits. However, speaking independently, the cultural and educational value of the unprecedented access to some the world's great art that Art Project provides to people around the world seems like more than a fair bargain for the risk incurred, especially given the high-resolution reproductions that already exist in books and elsewhere.

FCM: In some ways, I see this as precursor to Augmented Reality. Has this application been ported to a mobile phone? How much of a mobile phone's equipment might get used if it were?

JB: A mobile version hasn't yet been created, but it's certainly an compelling idea, and one we've definitely discussed. For Art Project to achieve its full potential as a location-aware mobile experience, some obstacles would have be overcome. Notably, given GPS's limitations indoors, a solution would have to be devised for coordinating the interface with the visitor's location inside a gallery. One option is to use WiFi to triangulate a visitor's location; or to use QR Codes to retrieve details on individual artworks.

Since the megapixel scans of some of the artworks let you inspect details that you can't necessarily see with the naked eye, I could imagine they would make a fascinating complement to viewing those artworks in person. Likewise, the viewing notes and content from Google Scholar, or the list of artworks by an artist are available in a museum would be wonderful to have access via a mobile experience. I don't know when or if a mobile version of the site will be made available, but I can imagine a whole host of amazing uses.

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