Have you been dreaming about visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam or St. Mark's Basilica in Italy (left)? Now you can take a tour of these landmarks — and many others around the globe — without having to hop on a plane.

Google on Wednesday added a new feature to Google Maps that lets you see 3D photo tours of more than 15,000 popular sites around the world. The search giant added tours for popular city landmarks and attractions like New York City's Central Park, the Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, London's Buckingham Palace, and the Trevi Fountain in Rome, among many others.

To find a photo tour, search Google Maps for a specific landmark, like Idaho's Shoshone Falls Park, and the results in the left-hand side of the screen will indicate if a photo tour is available. Google also posted a link to Google Maps with all available photo tours flagged. To view a tour, you'll need to turn on Google Map's WebGL feature, which brings 3D graphics to the browser without the need to install additional software.

Google uses "advanced computer vision techniques" to create the 3D tours from public, user-contributed photos from its Picasa and Panoramio photo-sharing sites, Steve Seitz, software engineer for Google Maps, wrote in a blog post Wednesday. The Web giant finds clusters of overlapping photos around major landmarks, and then uses the photos to render the 3D shape, location, and orientation of each site.

"Google Maps then selects a path through the best images, and adds 3D transitions to seamlessly guide you from photo to photo as if you're literally flying around the landmark and viewing it from different perspectives," Seitz wrote.