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Author: B._Scott_Burkett, Contributing Editor
| Introduction
In case you are relatively new to the WetCanvas! community, and are unaware, for the past five years we’ve also operated a site at art-agent.com. Art-agent.com is a site which provides free online galleries for visual artists. At one point, it held a catalog of over 600,000 works of art! Due to a number of business reasons, that original catalog is no longer in existence. However, in 2004 (this year), we revamped art-agent.com, and introduced a number of new tools and services. This article will detail the biggest new feature of them all … the smARTviewer! |
| The Problem with Viewing Art Online
One of the things that has always bothered us has been the lack of "presentation" when it comes to actually showing works online. For the most part, it is simply a "click here to view this image" model. Bah! I say! It looks, well, sterile, and is wholly ineffective for conveying the beauty of a work of art. Simple, scaled down images do not convey brushstrokes, or the detail of lines. The draughtsmanship and signature style of the artist can easily be lost when viewing a scaled down version of an image. This is perhaps one of the biggest reasons why fine art is a very difficult thing to sell in an online venue. When we browse art in a brick and mortar gallery, we are able to get up close and personal with the brushstrokes. We can really see the detail of a sculpture, and the colors in a painting. We can hear the ambience of the background music, carefully selected by the artist to match his or her exhibit. If we're lucky, we get free wine and cheese to boot. To make matters worse, for any online presentation to allow the viewer to really get "up close and personal" with the art, the artist needs to publish some massive image file, which not only takes forever to download by the viewer's web browser, but also opens the artist up to commercial exploitation (those high-res images look nice when printed on t-shirts, neckties, and notecards). There are watermarking solutions out there, of both digital and visual varieties, however these can be costly, and quite frankly, and in the case of the visual watermarks, can interefere with the viewing of the art. And don't even get me started about these companies selling Javascript based image "protection" scripts to artists. FACT: Javascript cannot and will not protect your image from theft. If you've handed your hard earned money to a company for one of these "right click disablers", or have downloaded one off the net for use on your web site, I hate to say it, but you are wasting your time (and possibly your money). Our quest was simple: How can we emulate the "gallery browsing" experience, or as much of it as possible, in an online format, and protect the intellectual property of the artist at the same time? Well, short of the wine and cheese, I think we've done it. |  |
| Introducing the smARTviewer
The big new addition to art-agent.com is our “smARTviewer”. The smARTviewer is a MacroMedia Flash-based pannable/zoomable image browser, that will allow the viewer to get up close and personal with the artwork, while at the same time protecting the intellectual property of the artist. Oh, and it can be accompanied by the artist's choice of "mood" music. For those of you who are tech-geeks, essentially, what we have done is implement an IIP server (Internet Imaging Protocol). The IIP server basically serves image tiles in real time, allowing the viewer to navigate very large images quickly and efficiently. This means an image that is 100GB in size will render just as fast as an image that is 50K in size. Let's take a quick tour, and we'll show you what this means to you, the artist. If you'd like to follow along, here is the link to the actual artwork used in this demo. Just click the thumbnail of the painting to launch the smARTviewer. Click here First, here is a screen shot of what the viewer looks like (currently). Basically, when someone clicks on a thumbnail at art-agent, instead of the image popping up in a new window (like on traditional web sites), a smaller window pops up, which looks like this: |
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| The first thing you'll notice, of course, is the art itself, in the main window, and then a smaller "navigation" area at the top left, which basically shows a smaller version of the original work. As you are zooming around inside the main area, you can use the smaller area to see where you are in relation to the larger work, and can even scroll around in there to navigate.
You can zoom in using the plus/minus buttons, or even cooler, you can use your mouse to draw a zoom box in the image. |
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| Let go, and you zoom down, in real time: |
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| Quick Jump: [ 1 - 2 ] | ||||
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