Google Art Project Brings Street View-Style Photos to Art Museums

You can now visit some of the most famous art museums in the world the same way you visit streets in the Street View of Google Maps. Art Project is a new Google website that uses Street View technology to make 17 top museums accessible to people who might not otherwise visit them.

In addition to strolling virtually through the galleries, you can view high-resolution photographs of many of the paintings. Each museum also chose a single piece of art for a gigapixel-style photograph, allowing you to enlarge the work to the point where you can see tiny details in brush strokes (similar to the HAL9000 project we featured a while back).

Here’s a video introducing the project and showing some behind-the-scenes timelapse footage of how the imagery was captured (can anyone tell what cameras and/or lenses they used?):

Where should they take Street View photography next?