Cappasity and New York Academy of Art Announce Collaboration to Showcase Art in 3D

Cappasity and the New York Academy of Art have announced their long-term partnership to showcase art pieces in 3D. On October 11, 2017, Sotheby’s, an international auction house, hosted the New York Academy of Art’s Annual Take Home a Nude® art party and auction, which featured a digitized sculpture up for sale. This was the first time that the Cappasity 3D digitizing technology was utilized by an educational institution.

As one of the most anticipated evenings on the New York social calendar, the event brought together over 800 guests from media, business, fashion, and the arts to raise over $1 million in scholarship funds for the Academy’s talented artists. More than 150 art pieces were up for auction, with the first digitized sculpture being Ganesha by Robert Taplin.

The Academy partnered up with Cappasity to display art pieces online for everything from exhibitions to fundraising auctions. The ongoing, multi-year partnership is aimed to showcase the Academy’s Cast Collection, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as sculptures created by faculty, students and other artists. The New York Academy of Art’s prestigious sculpture department includes faculty and graduates such as Will Kurtz, Steve Shaheen, Judy Fox and Cynthia Eardley.

Cappasity and the Academy also plan to offer virtual and augmented reality tours of the Academy’s major exhibitions and galleries, allowing viewers all over the world to ‘virtually’ visit the Academy.

“The technology by Cappasity allows users to have a great immersive experience of visiting a gallery or exhibition that is almost as intoxicating and interactive as the experience of visiting a real gallery or exhibition. We are pleased to commence our cooperation with the prestigious New York Academy of Art and give the Academy the opportunity to showcase their students art work to visitors from all over the globe”, said Kosta Popov, Cappasity founder and CEO.

“Our partnership with Cappasity will allow the New York Academy of Art to showcase the exceptional work produced by our students and faculty. We are so excited to utilize this incredible new program”, said Peter Drake, Dean of Academic Affairs at the New York Academy of Art.

Today, AR/VR technologies are not widely used nor very popular in the practice and creation of art because traditionally it has been technically difficult and challenging to create high-quality 3D content. Cappasity is the first сompany to take this step, that is to provide the art world an effective solution for easy 3D content creation.

The Cappasity platform allows everyone to easily create and embed 3D content into their websites, and virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality(AR) apps. It takes up to three minutes to make a 3D image of an object. Currently, Cappasity is expanding the capabilities of its platform — it is launching a global decentralized AR/VR ecosystem for 3D content exchange, which uses the platform as its basis. Copyright will be protected by blockchain technology within the system and a new digital currency, Cappasity Token, will be used as the ‘mechanism of exchange’ for the Ecosystem ecommerce.

The Cappasity team believes that AR/VR technologies will open up new horizons for the Art World by giving the unique opportunities of deep immersion into a created environment and interaction with any object.

NEW YORK ACADEMY OF ART

Founded in 1982 by artists, scholars and patrons of the arts, including Andy Warhol, the New York Academy of Art is a graduate school and cultural institution that combines intensive technical training in the fine arts with active critical discourse. Through major exhibitions, a lively speaker series, and an ambitious educational program, the Academy serves as a creative and intellectual center for all artists dedicated to highly skilled, conceptually aware figurative and representational art. The New York Academy of Art is also home to a major collection of 19th century sculpture casts, on permanent loan from prestigious institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.