The Large Hadron Collider is the centerpiece of CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research). It is the world’s largest laboratory for studying particle physics. Now, thanks to Google Street View, you won’t have to travel to Geneva to understand how it is helping to develop our understanding of the universe we live in. The Google Maps and the Google Street View project team have created a panoramic virtual tour of the CERN site and some of the behind the scene experiments. Start your CERN virtual tour.

The CERN home webpage had this to say about the process, which must have taken many man-hours:

Six-sided panoramic images were taken every three meters and four experiments were photographed, as well as 1200 meters of the LHC tunnel. The entire project generated 6,000 points that were coordinated with GPS locations to create a virtual tour of the laboratory.

The Google Blog mentions that the mapping was started in 2011. It took two full weeks for the team to capture the imagery across the 6,000 points. Apart from the Large Hadron Collider, the other four experiments which you explore in their own imagery include -- ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. Google says that the project is ongoing and many more experiments will be captured and displayed on Google Street View. For now, the CERN labs should rank at the top among the geekiest places you can visit for a virtual tour.

Source: Google Europe Blog