Google Earth’s got some competition now — from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which today unveiled its beta version of Bhuvan (meaning earth in Sanskrit).
A web-based tool like Google Earth, Bhuvan promises to give better 3-D satellite imagery of India than is currently being offered by the US-based software giant plus a host of India-specific features like weather information and even administrative boundaries of all states and districts.
The application can be downloaded from http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in/
The tool would offer pictures of the globe, just like Google Earth, and navigable in the same way but currently has the best resolutions over the Indian sub-continent. It allows users to fly from space to street level, grab, spin and zoom down to any place.
It also provides tools for measuring, drawing, saving, printing and visualizing thematic information. The resolutions currently on offer are good enough to view a vehicle moving on a road quite clearly.
Bhuvan currently only offers images taken between one and three years ago even over India. It combines satellite imagery from various sensors onboard IRS (Indian Remote Sensing) satellites and transposes them on a 3-D globe. As it keeps updating its database with more recent and higher resolution images, Bhuvan eventually promises to offer real-time data and images.
Incidentally, Indian authorities have had some problems in the past with Google Earth’s depiction of certain parts of the country. Recently, Google Earth admitted that it had mistakenly shown some areas in Arunachal Pradesh as part of Chinese territory and promised to correct the maps soon. The Indian government had earlier pulled up Google Earth for showing some sensitive and strategic defence locations on its maps.
“Bhuvan, an ambitious project of ISRO was started to take Indian images and thematic information in multiple spatial resolutions to people through a web portal through easy access to information on basic natural resources in the geospatial domain. Bhuvan showcases Indian images by the superimposition of IRS satellite imageries on 3D globe. The degree of resolution showcased is based on the points of interest and popularity, but most of the Indian terrain is covered upto at least 5.8 meters of resolution with the least spatial resolution being 55 meters from AWifs Sensor.”
Bhuvan Features
- Visualise 2D and 3D image data along with rich thematic information on Soil, wasteland, water resources etc.
- Fly to locations ( Flies from the current location directly to the selected location)
- Heads-Up Display ( HUD) naviation controls ( Tilt slider, north indicator, opacity, compass ring, zoom slider)
- Navigation using the 3D view Pop-up menu (Fly-in, Fly out, jump in, jump around, view point)
- 3D Fly through (3D view to fly to locations, objects in the terrain, and navigate freely using the mouse or keyboard)
- Drawing 2D objects (Text labels, polylines, polygons, rectangles, 2D arrows, circles, ellipse)
- Drawing 3D Objects (placing of expressive 3D models, 3D polygons, boxes)
- Snapshot creation (copies the 3D view to a floating window and allows to save to a external file)
- Measurement tools (Horizontal distance, aerial distance, vertical distance, measure area)
- Shadow Analysis (it sets the sun position based on the given time creating shadows and effects the lighting on the terrain)
How to Download & Install Bhuvan?
Register here. Download the Bhuvan plugin from here (its actually Skyline’s terraexplorer plugin) and Microsoft’s DirectX.
In order to install the plugin, you need to have the administrator privilege in your machine. The product works only in IE and is quite buggy to start with.
All said and done, the product is very well timed – we are close to celebrate India’s independence day and Bhuvan is one crown that ISRO will be known for in the coming years.
What’s your opinion?
its really interesting.. but the download is slow
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