1/ Museums are eager to attract a younger population

2/ Their collections of classical portraits deserve more attention from this audience

3/ People may not take the time to admire classical portraits but they do love taking, sharing and engaging with selfies - the new self portraits.

=> Google Arts & Culture's mission is to help cultural partners preserve, distribute and promote arts & culture with this new feature we're inviting a digital friendly audience to (re)discover Art by aligning with their social behavior.

=> Art Selfie is not a social campaign, it's a feature social by design

1/ User Flow: to use this feature, open the “Home” tab of the Google Arts & Culture app and scroll down until you see a card that says “Search with your selfie”. It’s not in the menu, but in the middle of the screen, in the content feed.

Tap “GET STARTED” to launch the feature. You will be prompted to take a photo, and then you’ll see the top results that are matched to your photo. From the results page, you can a) tap “SHARE” to share your result using any apps you have installed that support image sharing and b) tap the (i) icon to view more details about the artwork.

2/ Technology : this new experimental feature uses computer vision technology to compare a selfie with thousands of historical artworks.

3/ Learn more about arts & culture : the metadata that is displayed within the main flow of the feature is the title, artist and partner name. Users can visit the artwork directly via the experience to see all the details and discover more exciting stories about it.

4/ Experiment : this feature is still at experimental stage

Thanks to the feature, 70m+ selfies were taken and shared up to February 2017. Millions of new users downloaded the Google Arts & Culture app. Jimmy Kimmel and Fallon, Trevor Noah and more featured the app in their TV shows, a wave of American celebrities posted their matches and we’ve seen hundreds of articles. The most heartwarming story so far is this: Google Arts App Matches St. Louis Woman With Portrait of Her Own Grandmother.

There’s great demand to improve and expand the selfie-matching feature to more locations and we’ll share more news as soon as we have it. Currently it’s available for users in parts of the U.S. and in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India. We’ll continue to partner with more museums to bring diverse cultures from every part of the world online (any museum can join!), so you can explore their stories and find even more portraits.

Using computer vision technology, Google Arts & Culture developed a new feature that has managed to trigger the interest of millions of people on the classical art of self-portraiture by tie-ing it in the now regular habit of taking selfies.

The Lab of Google Arts & Culture in Paris developed a few years ago an IRL prototype named ‘portrait matcher’ based on Machine Learning, enabling visitors to have their portraits match classical portraits according to the orientation/ the angle of their faces. The engineers of Google Arts & Culture has considered this prototype as an opportunity to enable a younger audience to rediscover classical portraits, leveraging a popular habit : the selfie. The engineers of Google Arts & Culture took the ‘portrait matcher’ prototype a step further by launching an experimental feature as part of their app (for both iOS and Android) that allows users to take a selfie and find matching faces in artworks. This new experimental feature uses computer vision technology to compare your selfie with thousands of historical artworks from museums around the world that you can find on Google Arts & Culture.

The aim of the Google Arts & Culture is twofold. First, it gives access to art and culture to everyone, everywhere. Second, we are working with the cultural sector to help them share and preserve cultural content and create exciting cultural experiences with the help of technology online and in the museums. We launched an experimental feature that allows you to take a selfie and use it to search for artworks. It matches you to portraits from museums that look like you. Of course, you shouldn’t expect perfect matches unless your portrait is in a museum! You can share your results and explore more details about the matching artworks. This feature gives a new visibility to the thousands of classical portraits from partner collections available on the app. It is available in parts of the U.S., in Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore.