Google Arts and Culture has launched a massive online science museum platform with a number of museums, curators and archivists in 23 countries around the world.

Featuring more than 200,000 artefacts, Once upon a Try is an ambitious digital project built in collaboration with teams from institutions including NASA, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Smithsonian Institute.

Over 100 museums are involved, with other collaborators including London’s Science Museum Group, France’s Académie des Sciences and Network of European Museum Organisations’ (NEMO) Science Museum in Amsterdam.

The project aims to tell the story of scientific discovery via images, videos, and other content and is available online and on the Google Arts and Culture app on Android and iOS. Each exhibition is a celebration of some kind of invention or discovery in science.

NASA’s Virtual Universe exhibition allows users to browse through a vast catalogue of hundreds of thousands of photos. Users can enter search terms to pinpoint specific things they may want to discover or organise the library by category to find things.

CERN’s exhibition, meanwhile, is called The Big Bang in AR and is an augmented reality experience that is narrated by actress Tilda Swinton, telling the story of the beginning of the Universe.



There are a number of other wide-ranging exhibitions to explore, including those on people who invented things such as paper or the toothbrush, a documentary on Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang using gunpowder to create paintings and an exhibition on the wheel.

Some of the exhibitions use existing Google technologies to enhance their experiences, notably including CERN’s utilisation of Google Street View to display the Hadron Collider.

Once upon a Try is available now via the Google Arts and Culture website and smartphone app.