Google Maps had better start looking over its shoulder. With the launch on Monday of EveryScape’s The Real World Online beta, the voyeuristic world of online maps just got a lot more personal.

Google Maps Street View may have led the charge in taking it to the streets, but EveryScape’s interactive platform takes it one step further by actually going inside buildings.

“This is not fantasy. This is not virtual. This is the real world as you know it,” said Jim Schoonmaker, chief executive of Waltham, Massachusetts-based EveryScape. “I’m trying to build the whole world online. It’s a very humbling idea.”

Backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher New England, Draper Atlantic, and LaunchPad Venture Group, EveryScape launched its beta site with outdoor views of Boston and New York City and interior and exterior views of Miami and Aspen. The company plans to expand its interior views and to introduce new cities, including Laguna Beach, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in coming months.

While the site isn’t quite the real world, EveryScape’s panoramic peek inside local restaurants, hotels, and stores do go beyond the street views pioneered by Google.

In addition to including private spaces, part of what differentiates EveryScape from Google Maps Street View is its cost-effective 3-D modeling software. While Google captures its 360-degree street-level views with expensive spherical panoramic video cameras, EveryScape has technology to transform digital still photos from inexpensive cameras into 3-D models.

“This enables it to go anywhere a digital camera can go,” Mr. Schoonmaker said.

Rather than relying exclusively on professional photographers, EveryScape plans to build out its site and community further by enlisting the help of users for images. The site also takes mapping to the people by encouraging users to “tag” objects within its environment with links to additional content.

With links to additional destination information from Yelp, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Yahoo Local, the site functions as a gateway to the Internet, according to Mr. Schoonmaker.

“The Real World Online is a canvas, a work in progress that will rely on the community to determine its ultimate shape by adding discourse, texture, and color,” Mr. Schoonmaker said.

EveryScape is not the only company nipping at Google’s heals. While no one can currently come close to the scale of Google Maps Street View or Microsoft’s Live Virtual Earth’s Street-side imagery, startups Earthmine and MapJack are among the others scrambling for a sliver of the 360-degree map pie.

Although it would be challenging for a company without any brand awareness to go “head-to-head as a consumer destination with Google,” it would be too simplistic to write off EveryScape, said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.

Depending on its cost structure, it “may not be important for EveryScape to equal Google in traffic,” he said.

EveryScape’s business model is built around selling the interior views, called MiniScapes, to local businesses. Mr. Schoonmaker said that one node for $250 per year satisfies most business owners.

These listings provide virtual foot traffic and an opportunity to highlight reviews, menus, and sales, according to EveryScape. Although consumers will have to wait a while longer before they go shopping on EveryScape, listed stores can link through to their own e-commerce sites, and EveryScape can add links in its environment that correspond to items on their Web sites for purchase.

When asked about the response from business owners, Mr. Schoonmaker said that they are not disclosing figures at this point but that the reception has been “uniformly positive.”

Compared with going after national advertisers, this is a very inefficient business model, Mr. Sterling said. There are more businesses, he said, but they have less money to spend on advertising, and the market is very fragmented.

Mr. Sterling also said that EveryScape faces competition from the growing proliferation of online video advertising. He sees a particular similarity between EveryScape’s 3D interiors and the local merchant videos that the online video company TurnHere is producing for Citysearch.com.

The intersection between community and technology is the true key to EveryScape’s potential success, said Mr. Sterling. The social-networking angle is a way “to do something different than Google and get users involved,” he said. The strategy of using “ordinary pictures to populate the site and then using technology to knit the photos into a 3-D environment … gives them some opportunity to gain traction … and build a loyal following,” he said.

Whether or not EveryScape will gain the traction it needs to make it on the map remains to be seen. But if the company’s 3-D modeling technology is truly superior to Google’s technology and it can build a community, the startup may have just found its own personal map to the bank.