Google Cultural Institute launches Performing Arts section with 360-degree recordings, indoor Street View imagery

The Google Cultural Institute is making room for the performing arts.

First established in 2011, the Google Cultural Institute is an online home for works of art from hundreds of institutions, and with today’s launch of a new Performing Arts exhibition, its collection is becoming even broader.

There are new 360-degree performance recordings — YouTube videos, essentially — and you’ll be able to poke around certain parts of the facilities included in the exhibition thanks to new indoor Street View imagery, Google Cultural Institute director Amit Sood wrote in a blog post today.

“Wander through the wig workshop at Brussels’ opera house, look beneath the stage at the historic underground arches of the Fundação Teatro Municipal in São Paulo, or zoom in on ultra-high resolution Gigapixel costume images at France’s National Centre for Stage Costume, before browsing more than a hundred interactive stories about the shows, the stars and the world behind the scenes,” Sood wrote. “If you’re lucky enough to be planning an in-person visit to one of these venues, you can tour them in Street View first to see where you’ll be sitting, or how the view is from the balcony.”

You might think that in-depth footage might deter people from visiting these types of places in real life. But Googlers don’t see it like that. For institutions that have decided to put their work in the Google Cultural Institute, foot traffic has actually gone up, its program manager, Piotr Adamczyck, told the Wall Street Journal today.

Last year Google opened up its Cultural Institute as a platform for museums to create their own mobile apps. More recently the institute has been trying to make its artwork available in different forms. For example, earlier this month it launched a Chrome Web Store app to display a different work of art as desktop wallpaper every day.

You can visit the new Performing Arts exhibition here.