Bhuvan, the Indian mapping application launched

After Google and Wikimapia, now its India to launch its own mapping application. Bhuvan, the Indian mapping application has been launched.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has launched this application promising to provide satellite images of varying resolution of India's surface. The 3D mapping tool uses images taken a year ago by ISRO's seven remote sensing satellites, including Cartosat-1 and Cartosat-2. The satellites can even capture the images of objects as small as a car on a road.The application is a result of 4 years effort of Hyderabad based National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA).

NRSA is a part of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) and has been working on this project with the data provided by Indian Educational satellite Resourcesat-I

According to NRSA, Bhuvan will focus on rural and thematic applications like wasteland mapping and terrain profile along with weather details like humidity levels.NRSA has also cleared its point declaring that only the data approved by the Govt of India will be seen using Bhuvan. The viewers can zoom any picture up to 10 metres compared to Google Earth’s 200 metres and Wikimapi’s 50 metres.

The features include: Access, explore and visualize 2D and 3D image data along with rich thematic information on Soil, wasteland, water resources, superpose administrative boundaries of choice on images as required, visualization of AWS ( Automatic Weather Stations) data/information in a graphic view and use tabular weather data of user choice, 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), 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)

The website can be accessed on http://www.bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in. But to get all the features a visitor needs to install the plugin by registering himself there.