Photorealistic 3D on Ovi Maps sends Google Earth to Oblivion

Nokia had announced its biggest offense yet in the map and navigation system, the Photorealistic 3D rendering of metropolitan areas for the web version of Ovi Maps that adds a new dimension to the Ovi Maps experience and enables people to explore places in a completely different way. It is the most realistic available that 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.

This is a very exciting development in Map and Navigation which directly attacks Google Earth as it offers a new and exciting way of exploring places around the world. I would definitely be using it to discover places, I had always been wanting to tour the world but I cannot do that because I don't have money to spend, with this feature, I can at least see this places as realistic as it could be.

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