Google goes off the street for 360-degree gallery tours in stunning detail

Google's Street View technology is being taken indoors for the first time - into some of the world's most famous art galleries.

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 are among 17 museums which have collaborated with the internet giant to offer 360 degree virtual tours of their galleries.

Artworks, such as Chris Ofili's elephant-dung piece No Woman, No Cry, will be seen in "extraordinary detail"... beyond what is "possible with the naked eye". Each museum involved in Google Art Project, launched today, is showing one of the works in its collection in super-high resolution.

The Ofili painting, selected by Tate Britain, contains tiny images of London teenager Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in 1993, within a woman's teardrops. The Museum Of Modern Art selected Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night and the National Gallery chose The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger.

Each painting is captured in about seven billion pixels, making their online display about 1,000 times more detailed than an average digital camera.

Google said it took between four and eight hours to "stitch" together thousands of images for each painting. Details such as the tiny Latin couplet in Holbein's The Merchant Georg Gisze are revealed. As well as the 17 images in super-high resolution, 1,000 artworks can be seen on gallery walls.

Google has used its Street View technology to enable people to explore 385 gallery rooms around the world in the same way as they can 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."

Boris Johnson called the project a "noble initiative (that) will give millions a unique chance to experience great art collections from around the world, from the comfort of their computer".