Google Art Project brings world's best museums into your home

Google Street View can already drop users on the ground in faraway cities without going anywhere, and now Google Art Project is doing the same with some of the world's best museums.

This isn't as simple as just seeing an image of a painting that you could just search for in Google Images, Flickr or some other photo search engine.

Google Art Project actually takes you to the floor of a museum, offering high-resolution close-ups of approximately 1,000 works of art and tours of at least 17 museums. Right now that includes landmarks such as the Tate Modern in London, the MoMA in New York City and the Palace of Versailles outside of Paris.

Naturally, Google has integrated some of its other channels here, most obviously Picasa when it comes to displaying the photos. The information panels on each work of art will also lead to links by more pieces by the same artists as well as related YouTube videos.

The site is a bit slow to navigate through. That could be due to a variety of reasons, ranging from the high-quality images and videos or the fact that many users worldwide could be trying to access Google Art Project during the opening week.