Nokia today announced photorealistic 3D models of metropolitan areas for the web version of Ovi Maps.

Introduced at the Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California, Nokia's 3D free offering 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. Road-level imagery completes the experience with a detailed 360-degree panoramic view of streets.

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 and Vienna.