ISRO's new beta Bhuvan suffers heavily vis-a-vis Google Earth and associated programs like Wikimapia
Devangshu Datta / New Delhi Aug 15, 2009, 00:32 IST
Software is one industry where it is feasible to release experimental products in the hopes that user-feedback will help iron out bugs. This is what an open beta release seeks to do. “Beta” carries large built-in disclaimers.
The beta user-community sees bugs and instability as the price of indulging curiosity. Ideally, beta-user feedback leads to upgrades that eventually make programs more stable, useful and interesting for aam users.
If however, the beta is directly comparable to a popular, freely available product, then the standard of comparisons is unfortunately, much higher. ISRO’s new beta Bhuvan that launched on Wednesday suffers heavily vis-a-vis Google Earth and associated programs like Wikimapia. The image-mapping software from ISRO is clunky. It has many potentially useful and impressive features but it is being delivered in a condition that makes even hardened beta-users sweat.
The political imperative to releasing Bhuvan on or around I-Day (on Dr Sarabhai’s 90th birthday actually) may have been strong. It was behind schedule — there’s been a buzz about it since November 2008 at least. Nevertheless, it may have been better to wait or to release a “closed” beta without exposing Bhuvan as it stands to public view.
Bhuvan promises to do a lot more than G-Earth for India-specific users. It offers quicker data refreshment (the satellite pictures will be newer). It offers better street-by-street (indeed house-by-house) coverage with resolutions that will eventually be significantly better.
It also offers a load of useful metadata ranging across climate, weather, demographics, and the historical values of above. These could empower an endless range of commercially useful apps as well as research tools. It allows easy measuring and scaling and one-click snapshot of maps. This is brilliant. Once the next version incorporates Chandrayaan-data, including shots of the dark side of the moon, the geek community will have collective orgasms.
But let me list some of the frustrations. Bhuvan requires an 10.7Mb download from the ISRO site. The site has not been mirrored and it has been down near-continuously due to high traffic since the launch. That was three days ago, and 72 hours is long enough for even bureaucracies to take corrective action. The GoI has both the technological ability and the bandwidth. The Election Commission and the Railways, for instance, handle humongous traffic.
Anyway let’s assume a user gets there when the site is working, goes through the tedious registration (I’m the Phd who lives in Maradona-Nagar), downloads and completes set-up. Bhuvan can only be run off the site, post-login. This means permanent traffic jams. You will get kicked off regularly. The user-interface has good, deep menus but lacks much in the way of help though this is common to most beta-releases.
What is more, Bhuvan can only be used off Windows platforms, through an Internet Explorer browser with DirectX and MS.Net installed. It is not a “full-screen” app since it sits inside IE. It can only be run off broadband connections that are at least 756Kbps in speed.
All this ignores India’s realities in terms of user-preferences and of broadband penetration. Very few home-users have connections anywhere near that fast (default “broadband” is 256Kbps). India’s beta-users include a thriving Linux and Mac community while browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc are popular. DirectX is also not a safe environment. If ISRO does get hacked, DirectX will help to spread the pain.
Net-net, Bhuvan is a technically brilliant product with many innovative features. But it could fail to win widespread adoption due to the inability to consider the user perspective. It is possible to address all these issues. That’s what beta is supposedly about. Let’s hope that this is corrected in the stable release, whenever that is.
Huh! ISRO lended technology from Skyline Terragate. They even didn't bother to fork NASA OpenSource World Wind, which could have much better than Terragate.
Its no way comparable to G-Earth. Its a low end project with no clear picture and the only thing i would say is its a first step and would take years to come close to other similar applications. I was kind of surprised when the news came as "Rival To Google Earth", come on man, are you kidding.
Bhuvan is absolutely dumb piece of software. Comparing it to Google earth is a joke. I am reminded of a similar launch of some 500/- rupees laptop and the infamous "Simputer" (where it is now - any idea to anyone). I do not understand why Indians choose to become laughing stock of every one. Except "Tally" by Tatas, perhaps not one packaged software by India has made a mark. Jai Hind. Jai Ho.
Thanks for coming out with the truth,when other newspapers are lauding the effort.The software plug-in has been from another company called terraexplorer and is not indigenously developed.When India is house for many hi-tech companies,why not take their support in developing the same.The poor state of all government sites speak for themselves how money in the name of e-governance is misused.According to the government efiling of tax is filing the tax returns online and send the copy by post for acknowledgement.No doubt Indians are doing wonders,but whatever they do needs to be done in a manner that others do not make fun of us.There is no hurry to release beta to please Late Dr.Sarabhai ,will they launch a rocket with errors if Dr.Sarabhai's birthday is nearing ?
Indians are in the front when it comes to developing technology be it medicine, information technology, programs, databases etc etc. But when it comes to implementing and using technology we are far behind and can be compared to countries in the African continent.
It is high time to think about a prototype to implement technology else we should request people not to implement these and waste money.
Whats the use of building a system that costs millions of dollars and is useless in terms of user interface and functionality
The much touted high resolution images of earth which ISRO was talking of was all humbug. I was thoroughly disappointed with the quality of the images on the website. It seemed that I was downloading scanned images of a resolution say 200 to 300 metres but certainly not 5 to 10 metre as was being claimed. The images seemed hazy and blurred and what caused me further irritation was when I logged on to Google Earth and found that the images of the same area were not only sharper and clearer but also more recent say only about 2 to 3 years old as compared to the ISRO site on which images are more than 5 years old. It will be good for the Indian scientific community if they do not overhype things or raise unrealistic expectations. At the very least they should be realistic enough to compare their product with their competitors before shooting of their mouth.
First of all, you guys must understand that Google Earth is a massive app. Not even Microsoft can compete with that. Google has the best engineers & invests huge amount of money in their QA & User Experience. Google is a world leader in user interface. So you cannot expect ISRO to compete with that. ISRO has done a really good job so far. That must be appreciated. I'm sure that the team will eventually get to a point where Bhuvan can be employed for useful work specific to our country, which was their vision to begin with. We must appreciate the fact that all our indigenously collected satellite data is in public domain, which in itself is an accomplishment.
Apropos Mr. Datta's observation that Bhuvan's users must use Internet Explorer and DirectX, Mr. Datta may have also seen by now that the Direct Tax Code hosted by the Finance Ministry can be downloaded only if Microsoft's Internet Explorer is used to access the site, finmin.nic.in.
It is commonplace for government web-sites to function "best" if viewed using Internet Explorer and features such as Dot.net as opposed to other safer, but non-Microsoft, browsers and operating systems such as the ones Mr. Datta lists.
Touted as having high resolution Sat images (6-10 meters), secure in terms of showing strategic installation details on map and blah blah, Bhuvan isn't comparable to Google Maps.
The portal seems to be somewhat similar to those made by students for their college project. The download of 10.2 Mb software (which I earlier thought was an active-X)which sits in my Program Files Folder and Start Menu doing absolutely nothing, is frustrating.
I tried searching for Pune on the Map and it showed some places from Brazil and other countries, I had expected that this being a mapping application for India, would understand and take me directly to Pune.LoL
The User Experience is very very poor and overall I must say that this is not an app which I would use.
It's sad to see that there is no Linux version of the software. Especially in a country like India, where the government should take the initiative to push the open source platform, this is a bad decision. I suppose the bandwidth issue can't be helped because of the amount of data that would need to be streamed for an application like Bhuvan. Let's hope the concerned people correct the problems in future releases. At least this is a start.
Although I agree with most of your assessment, I do have to put another disclaimer. Your view about requirement of broadband connection is a little bit skewed. The application itself is image intensive. So, connection speeds have to be good. What I do not understand is, what is the download for. I never got it to work on my end. But, in general my observation has been that websites hosted in India aren't very fast! I don't know if it has something to do with the upload rates available... or just sheer carelessness.
I support your vision but not aggreed with the last line of second last para. " If ISRO does get hacked, DirectX will help to spread the pain."
I dont believe that ISRO will keep Bhuvan's database on the same Server or same Zone where they keep other informations. They can't do this type of mistake.Definately there will be defferent server for Bhuvan's Database.
-Cheers
I could'nt agree more!! sounds very true!! good reporting..!
Few points from me to emphasis:
-Better broadband penetration.. in terms of speeds..( 256 mbps is a joke. which is standard.)
-I've very high regards for ISRO, ( this is one clumsy user interface and poor packaging, sorry ISRO.)
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