HELSINKI, Finland -- When it comes to Finland's virtual reality Yellow Pages, forget your fingers. Your personal computer will do the walking, talking and listening.
It will take you to your banker or tax collector during working hours for an argument over bills. Interactive cameras hanging on trees or buildings will let you check which speakers are protesting and which musicians are playing in the central square on Sunday morning. You can drop in on any number of concerts, plays, casinos or simply friends for an afternoon chat -- all in real time.
Helsinki Arena, which is scheduled to begin service in less than three years, is an interactive guide to the entire city, with its streets, shops, government offices, companies and landmarks meticulously reproduced and connected, interactively and audio-visually, by way of the Internet.
City telecommunications engineers, company chief executives and the dreamers who put the project together are confident that Helsinki Arena 2000 will give the 1 million residents of the Finnish capital a new concept of bringing people together.
"What we are making is a 3-D interface that will create 100,000 private television stations in the city, uniting people through a combination of the telephone, the computer and the Internet," said Risto Linturi, a computer engineer who is the Helsinki Telephone Co.'s technology director. The company is financing the project. That such an avant-garde project should first appear in Helsinki, where floating into cyberspace is about as familiar as ordering Chinese food is in New York, is not surprising.
Finland has the highest per-capita use of the Internet and mobile phones in the world; it is estimated that more than 60 percent of the country's 5 million people are linked to the Internet.
Linturi, who works with a large team of researchers and technicians, sees only imagination as a limit to commercial and service applications.
"You can check out what is happening on Main Street, or click a university and pick a lecture to attend in real time," he said. "Everyone who places a tiny camera, a cheap device that is already common, on their personal computer -- from your banker to your barber -- can be accessible by video and sound in real time."
The click of a mouse button would produce the telephone numbers of all of a building's tenants, except those who are unlisted. There would be instant phone or video access to theaters and restaurants. From a wallet icon, a computer user would be able to pay and be ushered into a play in progress.
The fire department or the police would be able, instantly, to identify the building, street and home number from which a distress call is coming. Fire officials, at the touch of a button, could call everyone in the immediate vicinity with a recorded message to leave their homes.
"Our target is 100,000 simultaneous users, all wired in," said Immo Teperi, an easygoing Finnish architect working on the project, who started building computer models of vast sites nine years ago.
As he explains and demonstrates at the Helsinki Telephone Co.'s advanced technology laboratory, a guitarist sitting in a theater several blocks away uses a computer's live microphone to ask what the guests would like to hear.
"What is new," Teperi said, "is the mass application."
"Instead of making just one square or one building accessible, we are making a whole city accessible in a multimedia network with its everyday life," he said.
It is, of course, fun. But it is also big business.
"I think virtual reality is the main area" where communications can be used in the future, said Pekka Vennamo, president and chief executive of the government-owned Telecom Finland, which also runs the country's postal services and was the first in the world to offer its customers phone connections over the Internet, an application that is becoming common now.
"It's like luxury cruises which are a concept, not just a boat," Vennamo said at his offices, where his desk computer is topped with a tiny camera that allows him to run conference calls with his executives across town and throughout the country.
Business is also the reason the Helsinki Telephone Co., which is the largest private-sector operator in Finland, was willing to pour big money into Helsinki Arena 2000.
Linturi estimates that the cost of installing the support system, which is under way, could reach $100 million. The fiber-optic and copper wiring being placed underground all over town will serve several purposes, including telephone and electronic connections that will expand Internet and television use.
Linturi, the man behind the virtual reality dream, lives up to the part. Working strictly from home, he has no offices in the telephone company. At his new house, being built on the shore of the Baltic Sea in Helsinki, the ground floor is designed to have computers and large screens from which he will peer into the city and teach his students, a side occupation he cherishes.
"I am always afraid of the moment you stop feeling like a child, or wanting to be free as a child," he said, staring out the windows at his completed state-of-the-art sauna at the water's edge -- a place where Finns do their thinking and their relaxing.
"I believe more and more of us will be engaged in remote work from home, mobile phones or personal computers," he said. "I am already there."