Introducing Indshine platform

Today, we’re excited to launch Indshine, an online platform for visualising and sharing drone data, while also enabling you to get useful insights for industries like infrastructure, mining, solar, and agriculture.

While designing the Indshine platform, we sat down with the likes of drone service providers, people in the infrastructure, mining & solar industries, and we got to understand the problems they face in utilising the true power of drones and the output generated using drones.

Drawing from all of their experiences and adding our intuition into it, we decided to focus on the things that matter the most, but first, let us see how we got inspired to make such kind of drone data platform, that too, for the web.

Drones are creating a buzz

Drones have emerged as a powerful technology that is being adopted at a very rapid pace for a variety of commercial applications (such as aerial surveying, mapping, surveillance, etc.) in industries like Infrastructure, Mining, Agriculture, Oil & Gas, Power Utilities and many more.

Drones revolutionising the conventional industries

As they say, drones have proven to be a quantum leap in planning and monitoring of several conventional industries.

The main reason for this rapid adoption is due to its power of bringing ground measurements to our computer screen in a very quick and easy way. Images captured and processed from a normal camera (mounted on a drone) can be used for measurements in all 3 dimensions. This enables construction project managers and planners to understand every important detail from the comfort of their office on their computer screens.

As a result, a wheel of faster and accurate decisions starts turning and brings overall transparency in organisations.

So, what’s the problem?

1. Lack of effective visualisation: One of the main problems is the heavy size of 2D & 3D maps generated using drone images and it is difficult for any software to support their visualisation.
2. Getting insights is not easy: The second problem comes in analysing and working on these maps to gain useful insights like stockpile volume estimation in mining, excavation area calculation in infrastructure, defects analysis in solar industry and many more.
3. No collaboration: Most of them are desktop softwares, which doesn’t allow any form of collaboration. People share such data using Google Drive/Dropbox or even a USB or hard drive. We hate this part, as we feel this is not the right way to share visual data such as orthophoto, thermal maps & others.
4. Softwares installation required for everyone: Even if you shared an orthophoto using Google Drive/Dropbox/One Drive, the recipient (often a client for a drone service provider) must have to install the supporting softwares on their computer. Plus, the vector files need to be sent separately that is a part of the analysis that you performed on top of the orthophoto.
5. No single point of truth: All of a sudden, you realise that you and your client have a different version of the vector files. It may also happen that you have added another layer to that orthophoto. Now send the orthophoto and vector files again.
6. Lack of a structured repository: There’s no software that will store 5 TB of drone data and provide you with the ability to access it anytime to visualise and work upon it.

Solution

Many problems, one solution: A software that supports visualisation, analysis, collaboration all at the same time while also being accessible at any time, anywhere and for anyone.

Project repository, Orthomosaic Viewer

Thermal map, Annotations

Drawing from the feedbacks & suggestions of the drone service providers & the experts from the industries, we decided to focus on the things that matter the most and they are:

1. Visualisation

Nothing gets us more thrilled than to enable everyone in the world to visualise any kind of drone data in their browser on any device without having to install any of those desktop softwares. Plus, you can create as many projects you want and store any amount of data you want.

2. Analysis

This is your battlefield. We have made it our mission to empower our customers to get the insights they want in the best way possible. We’re building tools

3. Collaboration

As you may guess, without collaboration we couldn’t make it possible for you to make faster and accurate decisions. So we took care of it, too.

4. Community

Just like the sprawling open-source community in software development, we’re enabling everyone to showcase their projects to anyone on the web, thus enhancing the knowledge of everyone in the online drone community.

How it works

Getting along with Indshine and understanding the workflow is really simple.

1. Create a project: You can create a project either in public or private mode. Public projects can be viewed by all the users of Indshine. Private projects can be created by users where data is sensitive and the owner wants to give access to limited users.
2. Upload maps & models: Simply drag and drop processed maps & models on the world map in any project and within a few minutes, you will be able to view them and start working on it. Currently, supported data types are: Orthomosaic (.tif)
3. Mark or import annotations: Use the marking tools (point, line, polygon) to mark features/issues/locations/defects on your maps & models. In fact, you can import annotations by directly importing vector files (.kml, .kmz) as well.
4. Add multiple layers: You can add multiple layers of orthomosaics, elevation models, thermal maps etc. in a single project.
5. Share with your team: Share the project with your team with the edit or view access according to what you want them to do with it.

Creating project, Uploading data

Marking annotations, Sharing project

Conclusion

In a nutshell, with Indshine, not only can you visualise various kinds of drone data, share with your team & clients with appropriate permissions, but it also has everything you would want in a geospatial software such as marking annotations, doing measurements, importing vector files, adding multiple layers and much more.

Our goal is to drive the drone industry to the next level by creating useful applications on top of the drone data as well as building an active & connected drone community similar to that of the software ecosystem today. On one hand, the applications will solve industry-specific problems while on the other hand, the drone community will enhance its knowledge by sharing and interacting with each other on Indshine.

Send feedback

Currently, we are in the beta phase and hence, we have decided to make it available for everyone for free. If you are excited and would like to try, visit www.indshine.com and get started.

You can also explore some of the public projects on Indshine and if you like, try out with your own drone data as well.

1. A quarry in Switzerland: https://bit.ly/2NH69zr
2. A railway line in India: https://bit.ly/2EfM6ns
3. A forest in India: https://bit.ly/2GWlvja

Also, please give your feedback & suggestions so that we can make Indshine more useful to you.