Bhuvan The Indigenious Google Earth

ISRO has developed an indigenous application that explore and visualize IRS images over Indian region. Bhuvan is an initiative to showcase this distinctiveness of Indian imaging capabilities including the thematic information derived from such imagery which could be of vital importance to common man with a focus on Indian region. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. Bhuvan will also attempt to bring out the importance of multi-temporal data and to highlight the changes taking place to our natural resources, which will serve as a general awareness on our changing planet. There are lot more special value added services which will be enabled onto the web portal in due course of time and each one of those services are going to be unique to preserving and conserving our precious natural resources through public participation. We are sure the common man will get rich benefits from these Indian geospatial data services in days to come.

Some of the important 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)

Comparison between google earth and bhuvan :

Google Earth-------------------------------- Isro's Bhuvan

Zoom levels up to 200 mt------------------Zoom levels up to 10 mt

Single layer information------------------Multi-layer information

Images upgraded every 4 years-------------Images upgraded every year

No alternate viewing options--------------Options of viewing on different dates

Uses international satellites-------------Uses Indian satellites

(Source: The Times Of India)