From tying the knot to viewing artu00a0-- the Google Art project is a site that takes you into 17 of the world's biggest art museums and lets you gaze at works of Van Gogh and Co. for freeu00a0-- all in super-high resolution (an electronic image containing 7 billion pixels).

It's simple. On the site, simply select a museum, the direction you want to go in, and a zoom modification to feel like you are walking through the hallways of some of the most prestigious galleries in the world, from the MET in New York, to the National Gallery in London.


Using Google's street view technology (the same technology that lets you
spot your parked car on Google Earth) and a 14 billion pixel camera, it
brings over a thousand pieces of artwork right to your computer screen.
Each painting also has an attached legend that gives you more
information about it.

Using Google's street view technology (the same technology that lets you spot your parked car on Google Earth) and a 14 billion pixel camera, it brings over a thousand pieces of artwork right to your computer screen. Each painting also has an attached legend that gives you more information about it.

The level of detail on some of the paintings is magnificentu00a0-- on some portraits from the Museum of Versailles, we could make spot individual brushstrokes. For art afficionados who long to see the greats without burning a hole in their pockets, it's phenomenal.

That's not to say there aren't problems. There are restrictions on what you can see due to copyright ufffd so at the Museum of Modern Art, you can salivate over Van Gogh, but will not be able to see more than a blur of Picasso at the adjacent gallery.

In some places, the grainy street view photography is far from being easy on the eye. And then there's the question of selectionu00a0-- not everything you want and admire may be accessible to the same degree.

Still, anything that democratises art gets our vote. Now, it only remains to be seen how Google's latest projects do, given that the search behemoth tasted failure with its last two big venturesu00a0-- Google Buzz and Google Wave.