Google is using VR to let you step inside this 16th-century Bruegel painting

Google’s latest virtual reality offering is perfect for those of you who are really into Flemish Renaissance art, or just free VR experiences.

Google has an initiative, called the Google Cultural Institute, which has been trying for the last few years to make important cultural material available to everyone in the world. It is doing so by working with places such as museums to digitise artwork, artifacts, etc. And with virtual reality becoming a thing, Google has been embracing 360-degree video as a means of making cultural material more accessible and immersive.

It created a 360-degree video to put you inside the orchestra pit of New York’s Carnegie Hall, and now it’s using those same techniques to let you experience Bruegel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels, which is currently on display at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium. Google has published a video to YouTube that you can view with or without a Google Cardboard-certified viewer. It’s also available via the museum’s app.

It also helped the museum to create an exhibition, called Bruegel Box, which features projections of three Bruegel paintings. It basically lets you step in and be shoulder-to-shoulder with villagers and creatures from the paintings.

Bruegel (Pieter Bruegel the Elder) was a Flemish Renaissance artist from the 16th century. The Fall of the Rebel Angels is an oil-on-panel that he painted in 1562, inspired by a passage from the Book of Revelation.