Google Initiates the Google Art Project

Bringing technology developed for Google Street View indoors, Google introduced The Art Project.  Simultaneously they introduced an Art Project channel on YouTube.

These projects allowed viewers to take virtual tours of major museums, view relevant background material about art, store high resolution images, share images and commentaries with friends.

Each of the 17 museums originally involved chose one artwork to be photographed using gigapixel photo capturing technology, resulting in an image on the computer containing seven billion pixels, and providing detail not visible to the naked eye.

In 2020 this project was known as Google Arts & Culture.