Introduced last Tuesday, Google's Art Project is a new kind of interactive online showcase that allows users to virtually browse through some of the world's greatest museums using a Google Street View-like interface.

From London's Tate to New York's Met, 17 renowned museums can be viewed inside and out, for free.

The Art Project is more like a casual stroll through a museum than a truly encyclopedic resource of collections at this point. Possibly the best feature is the ability to zoom-in on some artwork.

"On top of the 1,000+ other images, each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or 'gigapixel' photo-capturing technology. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels--that's that's around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera--and a specially-built "microscope view" uses Picasa to deliver thie images at amazingly high resolution," Google said.