A trip around the world at the click of a mouse

Spin the globe at the bottom of the screen and take a journey on the Rhaetian Railway through the Swiss Alps.

Or perhaps you’d prefer to explore the mosaics of Pompeii. Or gaze upon the nine-storey Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain. Or track down the Aboriginal rock art at Kakadu National Park in Australia. Maybe all of the above.

No longer restricted to tarmac, Google Street View has gone off-roading to bring some of the world’s most impressive monuments and parks to the internet. The World Wonders Project is the latest creation from the Paris-based Google Cultural Institute.

To document 132 heritage sites worldwide, the Google team has partnered with content providers such as Unesco, the World Monuments Fund, and Getty to meld several technologies in six languages into one geohistorical platform.

To scan the nooks of Nijo Castle in Kyoto, Japan, and traverse the grounds of Stonehenge, Google had to ditch its car-mounted scanners, said Street View guru and World Wonders chief engineer Luc Vincent.

Instead it created image-capture equipment suitable for “beefed up” tricycles and vertical trolleys that can be pushed around to capture indoor sites. These trikes globe-trotted for a whole year, sailing down the Amazon and sitting atop the Glacier Express train in Switzerland.

At the moment, the majority of the World Wonders sites are in Europe, North America, and Japan — largely because they were easier to access, according to Steve Crossan, head of the Google Cultural Institute.

South America is represented by only three Brazilian sites, and mainland Asia boasts just two sites, both in Israel. Africa is empty. However, the launch is only the beginning, and Mr Crossan said his teams would be adding more sites as soon as they receive permission.

The institute launched Google Art Project early last year with 17 museums and about 1,000 works of art. In April, the updated version contained 32,000 artworks from 155 museums. The institute has also digitised Nelson Mandela’s archives, the Dead Sea scrolls, and documents and photos from the Yad Vashem centre for Holocaust research.

“We’re making places accessible to people who are not able to visit them,” said Mr Crossan.

When asked if a detailed, interactive travel experience would dissuade people from actually packing their bags and travelling, the Google team issued an emphatic no.

“In some cases, sites have been reluctant [to participate] because they fear that if it’s online, people will stop going to visit, but actually the opposite happens,” said Mr Vincent.

* exa.mn/wonders

* Reporting by Newsweek/Daily Beast Company