GLOBAL – Nokia City Scene takes you on a journey to far away lands, or at least to other cities across the world. Explore places before you get there to get a feel for the local environment or to find out what that place you’ve always wanted to go to looks like in 3D, right from your Nokia N9. Created from the Nokia Research Center, it’s a full-on visual location-aware experience.

Once you’ve decided what Featured City you want to explore and navigated your way there using the app, you’ll be shown a street view of that place. Combining NAVTEQ street imagery, building models and terrain data, Nokia City Scene creates and shows you an interactive panoramic street scene. Use the on-screen arrows to walk through different parts of the city for a more detailed look.

The buildings are interactive, which means that you can click on them and be shown what stores or services are inside, particularly useful if you’re looking at a shopping mall. This means you can save yourself a load of time and decide whether you need to venture inside, or not.

Another great feature of Nokia City Scene is the ability to connect your social networks to it. From within the app, you can view your friends latest check-ins from Facebook or Foursquare and take a virtual tour of where they’ve just been.

If you’ve found a restaurant that makes a perfect cheeseburger, you can let your friends know, so they can join you. The postcard feature lets you share that place image, along with its address so you’ll always know where you just were.

At the moment, the Featured Cities only cover London and about a dozen cities in the United States. However, there are plans to expand this in the US and in Europe.

Remember, it’s a beta app, so there may be issues with it. The guys over at the Nokia Beta Labs are encouraging you to trial out this app and provide them with any feedback at their forum.

Try out Nokia City Scene and let us know what you think of it.