Bhuvan – A great and national level effort by ISRO towards the web world. I feel a great proud on this effort. ISRO has taken an outstanding step towards use of its technology. Though the Indian government might be gaining a lot by the use of Indian Remote Sensing satellite (IRS), but Bhuvan demonstrates the use of IRS for the common man (I meant here by the Internet users). This is a great move to show how strong is India in terms of technologies and how far has it moved. The data collection through IRS is a simple case. India might have many other uses. But Bhuvan depicts a large picture for end user. It says – ‘Hey, IRS is not meant for business only. It is for you also. Come and see this. We are having that much of information and much more.’ Bhuvan is a small exhibition of IRS strength.
I don’t know whether in current scenario, it will compete to google map or not. But It really depicts the strength and innovation of Indian scientists. I hope they will be able to enhance the features provided in Bhuvan as they already have planned.
Jay ho
In this article, I would like to share my user experience with the Bhuvan.
Excerpts from bhuvan website at following link:
1. Bhuvan gives you an easy way to experience, explore and visualize IRS images over Indian region
2. Bhuvan, an ambitious project of ISRO 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.
3. Bhuvan showcases Indian images by the superimposition of these IRS satellite imageries on 3D globe. It displays satellite images of varying resolution of India’s surface, allowing users to visually see things like cities and important places of interest looking perpendicularly down or at an oblique angle, with different perspectives and can navigate through 3D viewing environment.
4. 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. With such rich content, Bhuvan opens the door to graphic visualisation of digital geospatial India allowing individuals to experience the fully interactive terrain viewing capabilities.
5. Multi-resolution images from multi-sensor IRS satellites of India is seamlessly depicted through the Bhuvan web portal by enabling a common man to zoom into specific area of interest at high resolution.
6. Bhuvan brings a whole lot of uniqueness in understanding our own natural resources whilst presenting beautiful images and thematic vectors generated from varieties of geospatial information.
Basic features of Bhuvan:
- Access, explore and visualise 2D and 3D image data along with rich thematic information on Soil, wasteland, water resources etc.
- Visualise multi-resolution, multi-sensor, multi-temporal image data
- Superpose administrative boundaries of choice on images as required
- Visualisation of AWS ( Automatic Weather Stations) data/information in a graphic view and use tabular weather data of user choice
- 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)
- Urban Design Tools (to build roads, junctions and traffic lights in an urban setting)
- Contour map ( Displays a colorized terrain map and contour lines)
- Draw tools (Creates simples markers, free hand lines, urban designs)
Procedure for using Bhuvan is as follows:
1. Register for Bhuvan at following link:
Note: Remember your username and password as for now they have not provided any forget password link. Don’t know why, but I faced this at one time as I forget the password J, Though I remembered it again.
2. After registration download Plugin to use Bhuvan. Since Bhuvan is currently intented for Internet Explorer 6.0+ and this plugin will be installed for IE so that Bhuvan can be used in IE.
(Though, as an developer in open source technologies, I am a great fan of browsers like Firefox, Safari and Chrome, as Indian end user market is dominated by Microsoft so they targeted mainly to Internet Explorer users, so that can be a reason to develop it currently for IE only. But I will be happy if they aim it for other browsers also, so that developers also can take interest into it. This will be really needed if they want to popularize Bhuvan similar to Google Map.)
3. After downloading install the plugin.
4. Go to Bhuvan website (Bhuvan) and login into that site.
5. It is very slow currently and will take few seconds to open. But after it will open you can get a picture as follows:
Now let see some of features:
1. At the right pane of the website, you will see many items, the main three are:
§ Search box: Searc h any location
§ Add layers: One can add layers here
§ Bhuvan Layers: It further contains Vector, which contains two layers:
§ Base layers
§ Information Layers
2. You can get information at following levels of region from Bhuvan:
§ Country
§ State
§ District
§ Taluk
§ Towns
§ Villages: It seems, currently this feature is only following states:
§ Andhra Pradesh
§ Haryana
§ Gujrat
§ Karnataka
§ Kerla
§ Tamilnadu
3. Road and highway information can be retrieved at following basis:
§ Golden Quadrilateral (Swarnim Chaturbhuj)
§ National Highway
4. Other information also can be retrieved on map:
§ Location
§ Watershed
§ Wasteland
§ Soil
The problems with the current version of Bhuvan can be subdivided in two parts:
a. Look and feel of website is not so good.
b. I was not able to scroll in left pane when all items are open in Tree
c. Images at city and street levels are not clear. Sometimes it seems like I am zooming in and zooming out same image.
A great organization like ISRO should also concentrate on the user perspective. If look n feel and Processing will be so slow, they will find less number of users. As a developer I (and many more) would like to join the development, but will they allow. The main points are:
1. Are they having intention to compete with google map?
2. Will this be a simple start and end or there will be more versions in both – End users and Developer’s perspective.
3. Google map is popular because they let user participate in each manner to their products – in each term whether it is Development or Suggestions. User willingly participates and plays around their products like. What is ISRO’s plan for this?
4. How is ISRO going to market it and popularize it?
There are many more questions, answers of which may lie under plan list of ISRO or the time will reply for these. But I am hoping that Bhuvan will change the world and leads India to front in terms of Innovation.
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