Google Street View "Trekkers" have been responsible for turning parts of the frozen Antarctic, the Pyramids of Giza and many more iconic spots into immersive panoramas viewable at the click of a button and the museum is one of the latest to get the treatment.

Queensland Museum is one of 14 Australian museums and cultural organisations jumping on board the search giant's cultural project from Tuesday, adding to the 600-plus collections from around the world already available online.

Its virtual tour even includes never-before-seen collections off-limits to the normal visiting public.

Other Australian additions include the Australian War Memorial, National Museum of Australia, Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Bondi's Sculpture by the Sea.

QM chief executive officer and director Professor Suzanne Miller said she hoped the project would "massively" increase the museum's online audience and bring more visitors through the doors.

"We have our own collections online but people will [only] come to that if they know about Queensland Museum," she said.

"By going through an international portal like the Google Cultural Institute it opens up the world and it opens up Queensland Museum to the world for people who don't even know that Queensland exists.

"They know that Google exists, but they might not have heard of Queensland and they certainly haven't heard of Queensland Museum, so all of a sudden you have a global audience."

The tool lets you sit at a computer at home or pull out your phone to take a virtual tour around the museums, just like you would in Google Street View.

From there you can drill down to get more information about individual exhibits and "literally see down onto the hair of a butterfly on its wings" thanks to the QM's collection of high resolution photographs, according to Professor Miller.

The mapping process itself was pretty simple. One Google employee spent two sessions of three or four hours each walking around the museum wearing an 18-kilogram backpack crammed with 15 cameras.

From there the images were stitched together into panoramas and uploaded to create the virtual experience, a process which took much longer.

"It takes a panoramic image every three to five metres and it pretty much does Street View imagery where you can't go with a car, so it allows us to go on treks on the beach, bush walks, and galleries," Google Street View operation leader for Australia New Zealand Veril Sjarif said.

The Queensland Performing Arts Centre across the road from the museum has also received the Google Street View treatment.

Google brought the trekker to Australia in February last year to begin mapping places that couldn't be reached by car.

The cultural institutions involved:

Canberra

Australian War Memorial (including Street View tour)

National Museum of Australia (including Street View tour)

National Portrait Gallery

Australian National Maritime Museum

Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House

NSW 

Powerhouse (Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences)

State Library of NSW

Australian Museum Biennale of Sydney (Street View tour of Cockatoo Island 2014 venue)

Bondi's Sculpture by the Sea (Street View tour)

QLD 

Queensland Museum (including Street View tour)

Queensland Performing Arts Centre

VIC 

Public Records Office Victoria (Victorian Archives Centre)

Australian Centre for the Moving Image