Art Project, a Virtual Museum from Google with 7 Gigapixel Images

Google's "20 percent" policy, which enables its employees to spend one day a week working on their own projects, has been the source of plenty of cool things from the company, starting with Gmail. The latest is Art Project, an online art gallery with over 1,000 works from 17 world famous museums.

Visitors can view the works of art in great detail, several were shot at a 7 gigapixel resolution, and even walk around the museums thanks to Google's Street View for interiors technology.

"A small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible," Amit Sood, Head of the Google Art Project, wrote.

"We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge—like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors!," he explained.

"Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for yourself today at www.googleartproject.com," he announced.

Over 486 artists are represented in the online gallery Google set up in partnership with the 17 museums. In total, there are over 1,000 high-detail images of the works.

Each museum also chose one painting to highlight in incredible detail, each image is made up of 7 billion pixels. Art Project uses Picasa's newly launched zoom viewer to enable visitors to see the finest details without actually loading a 7-gigapixel image.

Also interesting is the possibility to visit the museums virtually and wonder around with a tool similar to Street View. In fact, Google built a special "vehicle," actually a trolley, to capture the 360-degree images. You can also create your own personal collection, selecting the works that you like the best from any museum and sharing them with friends.