Museum Looks Picture-Perfect Online

Dresden’s Old Masters Picture gallery is the first museum to create an online clone, now appearing in all its glory—down to the trash cans and fountains—as a location in the virtual reality game Second Life. The building’s 750 paintings have been reproduced digitally, as have the 37,000 square feet of the grounds itself, Wired reports

The online museum—most famous for Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, with its iconic pair of doting cherubs—had 10,000 avatar visitors in its first month. Other cities plan to get in to the virtual tourism act; Cologne will open an online version of its cathedral soon. (More Second Life stories.)