Google Street View now allows users to roam the world's finest museums from the comfort of their own homes.
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."
The technology offers a 360-degree virtual tour of 17 museums, like 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.
Each painting is captured in about seven billion pixels, making their online display around 1,000 times more detailed than an average digital camera.
Google said it took between four and eight hours to capture each painting in great detail with thousands of images, which are 'stitched' together.
It used Street View technology to enable people to explore 385 gallery rooms around the world in the same way they virtually wander down streets 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."
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."
"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," the Daily Mail quoted him as saying.
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