Nokia announced photorealistic 3D models of metropolitan areas for the web version of Ovi Maps. This immersive and free feature adds a new dimension to the Ovi Maps experience and enables people to explore places in a completely different way.

Introduced at the Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California, Nokia's 3D offering is the most realistic available and goes beyond rendering limited areas and buildings by making entire cities, including suburbs, available for exploration.

Starting with a bird's-eye view, people can scale up and down and move around objects such as buildings and trees from their desktop, experiencing a virtual but super realistic perspective of new places. Road-level imagery completes the experience with a detailed 360-degree panoramic view of streets.

With the beta service featuring 20 metropolitan areas, the number of photorealistic 3D models will increase over time. The road-level imagery is now available for five cities, Copenhagen, Helsinki, London, Oslo and San Francisco.

With the goal of bridging the real and virtual worlds on both mobile and web, Nokia's Ovi Maps for mobile covers 180 countries, nearly 100 of them navigable in 53 languages. Ovi Maps on the web covers 180 countries, 93 of them navigable, in 29 languages.

Nokia's photorealistic 3D models of metropolitan areas initially include:

- Barcelona

- Boston

- Chicago

- London

- Copenhagen

- Florence

- Helsinki

- Las Vegas

- Los Angeles

- Madrid

- Miami

- Milan

- New York

- Oslo

- Prague

- San Francisco

- Stockholm

- Toronto

- Venice

- Vienna

Head to  www.maps.ovi.com/3d (you may need a browser plug-in to be installed)