Gugelmann Galaxy is an interactive demo by Mathias Bernhard exploring itens from the Gugelmann Collection, a group of 2336 works by the Schweizer Kleinmeister – Swiss 18th century masters. Gugelmann Galaxy is built on Three.js, a lightweight javascript library, allowing to create animated 3D visualizations in the browser using WebGL.
The images are grouped according to specific parameters that are automatically calculated by image analysis and text analysis from metadata. A high-dimensional space is then projected onto a 3D space, while preserving topological neighborhoods between images in the original space. More explanation about the dimensionality reduction can be read here.
The user interface allows four types of image arrangement: by color distribution, by technique, by description and by composition. As the mouse hovers over the items, an info box with some metadata is displayed on the left. The user can also perform rotation, zooming, and panning.
The author wrote on his site:
The project renounces to come up with a rigid ontology and forcing the items to fit in premade categories. It rather sees clusters emerge from attributes contained in the images and texts themselves. Groupings can be derived but are not dictated.