Nokia’s Ovi Maps Introduces New 3D Maps Technology

April 21 20:02 2011 by Alexei Rivera Print This Article

A 3D view of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, near the Golden Gate

One of Nokia’s most powerful features with their Symbian-powered phones have got to be the free walk-and-drive navigation running on Ovi Maps. The mobile software is actually a great service and one of the most polished apps that Nokia has on Symbian. The mobile manufacturing giant has been entirely committed to improving the overall Ovi Maps experience – and this time, they’ve introduced quite a powerful feature that we hope we’ll see more of. They call it Ovi Maps 3D, and it is an accurately texture-mapped, polygonal 3D version of popular cities worldwide. It sounds crazy, but they did it.

Watch the video below to see this feature in action:

After seeing the video, we’re actually a bit impressed. You can see around buildings and view landmarks that we’ve been seeing from 2D pictures for years, but now we can explore these cities in the comfort of our homes. Nokia says, “It’s almost like being there. Cities and neighborhoods can now be visited right from the sofa, smoothly from air to the streets in downtown areas,” and we can pretty much agree. Maybe we’ll even be able to go on 3D virtual tours in the future – or at least get some amazing maps to navigate with on our devices.

It’s a bit unfortunate that it only features a couple of major US and European cities thus far – at least with a promise of more cities to come. We’re hoping they’ll do Manila, but I wouldn’t think we’re one of their priority cities right now, even if we have a large Nokia-using population. Also, Ovi Maps 3D is limited to our desktop web browsers and requires a specific plugin to work. So it won’t be showing up on our mobile devices anytime soon – but we like the prospects of it showing up there sometime anyway. For now, you can enjoy 3D views of the worlds’ most famous cities by going to maps.ovi.com and clicking the 3D button on the upper-right hand corner. Happy Exploring!