Heralded by observers as a step that could change the way people travel, live, and work in the city, Microsoft and Google have launched features that allow computer users to fly over realistic 3-D renderings of the city’s skyscrapers or take street-level tours such as following Broadway between Battery Park and Yonkers.

The developments were announced yesterday at the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, Calif.

Google users may view 180-degree photographs of almost every street and intersection in Manhattan, as well as sections of the other boroughs. For the past 18 months a company, Immersive Media, has sent Volkswagen Beetles outfitted with about $250,000 worth of video equipment to drive almost every mile of Manhattan and other parts of the city, the company’s president and CEO, Miles McGovern, said.

On top of the car is a dodecahedron camera with 11 lenses, each taking in streaming video at 30 frames a second. Google licensed the images and integrated them with its maps.

Mr. McGovern estimated that the 40,000 miles of America his company has documented — 2,000 of them in New York City — are captured in about 120 million spherical images.

On Friday he is meeting with New York City officials, who he said are interested in how the huge amount of data could be used for counterterrorism, disaster response, and other projects. A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, Jason Post, declined to comment about the city’s plans.

Mr. Bloomberg announced in this year’s State of the City address plans to allow residents to send complaints to 311 along with images or videos.

Microsoft also released a map of New York City that uses photographs to create 3-D renderings of the city’s skyline, a feature Google is also pursuing, according to published reports.

“It’s like somebody discovering video for the first time,” a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts who is a virtual designer, Jean-Marc Gauthier, said. “When I see this kind of project, I see a roadmap unfolding that is actually pretty ambitious. It can change the way people live and the way they organize space.”

Mr. Gauthier said that with a special camera that detects a person’s exact position and direction, there would soon be a day when anyone could post a photo of their favorite deli on a Web site that combines thousands of images to create a detailed, 360-degree perspective of the location — a kind of user-based layering of images.

“That’s the next step,” Mr. Gauthier said.

A product manager for Google Maps, Stephen Chow, said he used the technology to scope out neighborhoods where he was looking for apartments in San Francisco.

“I would go to that location and see whether the listing was right for nearby restaurants and public transportation,” he said. He said he could also zoom in on parking signs to find out when he had to move his car to avoid getting a ticket.

A senior product manager at Microsoft, Kevin Hagwell, said the 3-D map of the city could allow someone to make plans with a “richer level of data,” including traffic and a more user-friendly visualization of the area.

To some, what’s most interesting about the new features is the long-run angle.

Christina Ray, an artist and the founder of an artists’ lab that focuses on public space and technology, Glowlab, said the gigantic data store is “like a living time capsule somehow.”

Google plans to update the photographs at intervals that haven’t yet been specified, but the data could be used to show the changing shape of the city or to create models for how the city could develop in the future.

“It’s almost like a moving time lapse,” Ms. Ray said. “You are moving through space and time, almost going horizontally and vertically at the same time.”

Glowlab in September is hosting its fourth Conflux festival, where artists, filmmakers, street artists, and architects exhibit projects that explore the city in new ways, often pulling in GPS, cameras, and other technology to “navigate, annotate, and tag physical space,” she said.