Its controversial Street View guide has already let millions take a peek at private addresses all over the world. 
Now Google is harnessing this technology to allow users the chance to roam the finest museums on the planet - from the comfort of their own home.
The online search giant even claims its Art Project tours are better than the real thing, with one exhibit in each location available in a high-resolution image that goes beyond 'what is possible with the naked eye'.


Tate Britain, the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and the Palace of Versailles in France are among 17 museums that have collaborated with the internet giant to offer 360 degree virtual tours of their galleries.
The Tate has chosen Chris Ofili's No Woman No Cry, a painting on elephant dung that contains tiny images of murdered London teenager Stephen Lawrence within a woman's tear drops, as its high resolution image.
Each painting is captured in around seven billion pixels, making their online display around 1,000 times more detailed than an average digital camera.
Other works of art which can now be seen in great detail include Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night from the Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA) and The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger at the National Gallery.

Google said it took between four and eight hours to capture each painting in great detail with thousands of images which are 'stitched' together.
The technology reveals hard to see details such as the tiny Latin couplet in Holbein's The Merchant Georg Gisze.
As well as the 17 images that can be seen in super-high resolution, 1000 artworks can be seen on gallery walls.
Google has used its Street View technology to enable people to explore 385 gallery rooms around the world in the same way as they can wander down streets virtually with Google Maps.
Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota said the project 'gives all our audiences an unrivalled opportunity to come really close to great works of art'.
He said the gallery selected the Ofili painting because it was 'made in the last 15 years about an issue that's highly relevant to large number of people in this country'.
Nelson Mattos, vice president of engineering at Google, called the project "a major step forward in the way people are going to interact with these major treasures".
He said that 'millions of children who will probably never have the opportunity to see these great pieces of art' will now be able to do so online.
He added: 'We don't believe that this technology is going to prevent people from coming to the museums. We hope that the opposite is going to happen. This is just the first step, the first incarnation of the system. The project is going to continue.'


 
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