Google’s Street View technology lets you stroll faraway boulevards and take in the architecture of distant cities. Now it will let you wander some of the world’s great art galleries, sampling a smattering of the world’s most popular artworks in super high-res.
Google Art Project has rolled the same tech it employs in its famous Street View cars through 17 famous museums including London’s National Gallery, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, gathering 360-degree navigable imagery that lets users take a virtual walk through some of the world’s great art institutions. Missed the State Tretyakov Gallery last time you were passing through Moscow? No sweat.
The Art Project doesn’t allow you to tour all the museums in their entirety—that’s for paying patrons—but using a pared down Street View car known as “the trolley,” the mapped more than 385 rooms across the 17 galleries, collectively representing thousands of works. Many works have been individually imaged, allowing for a better resolution examination of individual works that allows users to zoom around a canvas.
Moreover, each gallery selected one work to image with extremely high-resolution “gigapixel” tech, allowing users to zoom in on features and details not even visible to the human eye (it’s a very Ferris-Bueller-at-the-Art-Institute-of-Chicago kind of experience). Indulge your cultured sidehere or check out the visitor’s guide below.
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