Trying art on for size in your living room

From tumblr to Behance, the internet is covered in art. A lot of art. Artists, students, and doodlers alike use their social media profiles as portfolios, and fill the web with funny photoshops, fan art, and paintings too.

Plenty of websites offer you the ability to bring some of that visual art into your home—many Etsy shops sell posters and prints, and flickr just started up their own printshop—but Curioos’ appeal is its curation: artists have to be invited to join the service, so you must be getting something good. Curioos, once a humble tumblr blog, is now a full-fledged wall art marketplace with over 50 artists, collections in various genres (Digital Painting, Vintage, LOL, and Man Cave, for example), and prints on paper, canvas and aluminum.

Tuesday, Curioos released a mobile app that will help you see the art in their marketplace in your home with augmented reality. Built in Unity3D, the app uses the camera on your device to display a real-time image of your wall, complete with resizable art. The digital model the app presents is visible from all angles, even close up.

it’s about the consumption of art

Curioos’ app distances itself from art experiments like the Tate Modern’s recreation of famous paintings in Minecraft by being about purchasing, rather than about extending or improving the art. In some ways, it’s more similar to Electric Objects’ wall-mounted frames for static or moving digital art—it’s about the consumption of art, and what it means to have that piece in your house.  With the new app, you can try the art on in any room, on any wall, and get a feel for how it works in your living space, or you can do what I did and browse through a bunch of paintings for the fun of it.