Last year, I spent a night inside a Vincent van Gogh painting. The room—a promotional Airbnb for a related exhibit at the Art Institute—should have been a silly gimmick. After all, the bed frame was shellacked with impressionist swirls, and the cups and vases were glued to the side table. Instead, it felt like an uncanny journey into van Gogh’s psyche, which made seeing his bedroom painting series only more incredible the next morning.
I’m reminded of that night as I slip on a Google Daydream VR headset and try Art Plunge, a new app in beta by the Swedish developers Martin Eklund and Martin Christensen. It places you in a stark gallery. Three masterpieces hang on the wall: Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.
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If I look long enough at these paintings, I can actually begin to see inside. The canvas melts away, and the scene expands. Suddenly, I’m inside a Vermeer. The fruit radiates with golden light in three dimensions. His subject almost seems to breathe. And by turning my head, I can look out the window and see the Schie River. This view isn’t in Vermeer’s painting, of course. But it’s actually a Vermeer, too. It’s his painting View of Delft, mapped seamlessly into another one of his scenes.
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Source: Fastcodesign