Indian digital mapping company MapmyIndia has released its Mappls Realview – a new 360-degree panoramic street view service. The company says RealView features over 40 crore geo-tagged panoramas, and has offered part of its repository -- almost 1,00,000km -- free for consumers, following which the service will be chargeable.

"The idea here is to give viewers a ground reality of the place and enable them to explore a certain place as if they were there," Rohan Verma, CEO of MapmyIndia, tells Autocar India in an interview. The detailed views, Verma says, are especially useful on complex intersections and for people who have to constantly navigate like taxi drivers and food delivery persons.

"We have created maps tracking vehicle-specific routes and vehicle-specific traffic conditions, and we have collected house-level adress details," Verma says, adding that this gives the home-grown service a distinct advantage over crowd-sourced platforms like Google Maps. Mappls is also offering users road-safety alerts like speed limits, speed breakers and speed cameras. 

MapmyIndia says  this system is not just useful for road users but also for app developers and it can be used across private and public sectors.