Welcome to the Virtual India Project!     Our map is now online. This is our first public release and we’d like to point out the key limitations. First and foremost, even though the underlying technology can scale very well, our current site is fairly small – implemented on 3 servers -- and can easily get swamped if too many people try to use the system. We have not yet enabled the multi-lingual soft keyboard or the ability to *add* public pushpins. We have street-level maps only of Bangalore (you can zoom down to Bangalore and view the street map of Bangalore in multiple languages). We have rendered these maps and translated street and place names ourselves. Bear in mind that there can be errors in both the underlying data and in the rendering and transliteration process. Do report any gross errors in our online forum and we’ll try to fix them. At this time, we have not enabled the full functionality of community pushpins. While you can search for a set of pre-loaded public pushpins (like “park”), we do not yet allow users to *add* public pushpins in this public version of Virtual India. We will enable adding of public pushpins in about a week – after we have had the chance to gauge the load on our servers and to respond to initial feedback on our site. We are keen to make this functionality available to the Indian internet community at large. However we need to first decide how to make it extremely clear to users that the community generated pushpin content would be “as is” -- un-verified data from anonymous sources, over which we have little control.     About Virtual India: Virtual India is a research project by Microsoft Research India, in collaboration with the Government of India's Department of Science and Technology, powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth™ technology.

Bear in mind that this is a research prototype! The primary goal of this project is to explore novel and effective ways to collect and disseminate geospatial data and leverage multi-lingual technologies within maps. We currently have fairly limited data -- 1:1M India-wide data as well as 1:8000 Bangalore city data. The site will evolve based both on our own research directions and the feedback from the community. We welcome your participation and feedback in our online forum, and your feedback will greatly influence how we evolve this site going forward.  We are not currently deployed at Internet scale, so bear with us if the site gets overloaded at times, or there are issues with the service or content.

We are working closely with the Survey of India on this project. We plan to use our experience with this online pilot to plan the next stage of our research efforts. With this version, we have chosen to get some early feedback on community-created (multilingual) content.   With Virtual India you can:

• Add and edit places that are seen by all Virtual India users.
• View maps of India in English, Kannada, Hindi, and Tamil.

Here's how you can add to this pilot multi-lingual online map of India:. 

• [Coming soon] To create places: Right-click on the map and select “Add Public Pushpin.” You can add titles, descriptions and pictures. Additionally, by adding tags, other users will be able surf for other places with the same tag name. Annotations are uploaded to our server and are can be viewed (and edited) by everyone. Please DO NOT put any personal information into these public pushpins -- this feature is intended to explore ways for the community to add information of general interest to the community.

• To search for places: Type your search string in the Annotation Box. If you feel that anything about a place should be changed, please do so. Anyone can make chances and there is no review process, so never assume the accuracy of the information in "editable" pushpins.

About our technology:

This project is built on top of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, a highly-scalable technology for delivering map and satellite imagery over the Internet, and the same technology that powers Windows Live™ Local.

Finally, be sure to read our terms and conditions and privacy statement before using the site.