The Google Art Project Brings Museum Art to Your Finger Tips

The Google Art Project is here! The Project, which started out by a group of art enthusiasts at Google, is now a tool that allows you to travel to 17 of the world's most reputed museums from your living room. Google tied up with Picasa and App Engine to make this project possible. What's more, they took Street View indoors to provide an inside tour of each of these museums. Street View took 360 degree pictures of the insides of these museums and stitched them together along with location mapping to create virtual tours. By the way, the museums include the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, Tate Britain and the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi in Florence and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. So far, there's no love for the Louvre yet so you Mona Lisa fans might actually have to travel to Paris.

What's more, Google's enhanced the art viewing experience by taking pictures of the artwork not in megapixels but in gigapixels. Each picture contains about 7 billion pixels and a specially built microscopic view along with Picasa's technology allows you to see even the minutest of minute brush strokes in any picture. What's more, you can create an 'art collection', which means you log in with your Google account and add the pictures of the art work you like to view a lot in a folder. To get to the Google Art Project, click here.