Atlas is a field companion for places where the signal stops. A language model, a vision model, speech recognition, offline maps, a compass and a document library — all running on your own phone, with the network switched off.

WHAT IT DOES WITHOUT A SIGNAL
Designed & Developed by Mushahid Bhat PhD CSE IIT Delhi

• Ask questions and get answers. A small language model runs on your phone's processor. Ask about altitude sickness, a sprained ankle, purifying water, or what to pack — and get an answer with no connection at all.

• Save maps before you go. Find the valley, pass or town you are heading to while you still have signal, choose satellite, topographic or street, and save that rectangle. It then draws from your phone's storage, with your GPS position on it, in airplane mode.

• Search 67,000 places offline. A gazetteer ships with the app, so you can look up Leh, Nubra, Manali or a mountain pass and get its coordinates and elevation with no network.

• Know which way you are facing. A compass corrected for magnetic declination, with your coordinates and your true height above sea level after the geoid correction — not the raw ellipsoid figure most apps show.

• Read signs and documents. Point the camera at printed text in English or Devanagari and have it recognised on the device.

• Look at a plant or an insect. The app describes what the camera can see and will suggest a name — while telling you plainly how far to trust it.

• Carry your own documents. Import PDFs and text, and ask questions about them. The passages used to answer are shown alongside the answer.

• Speak and listen. Ask by voice and have answers read aloud, all on-device.

HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT CANNOT DO

Atlas does not give turn-by-turn directions: a saved map holds no routing data, so it gives you a bearing and a realistic time estimate rather than an arrow it cannot honour.

Atlas will not tell you whether a plant is safe to eat. Small models running on a phone are frequently wrong about species, and the app says so on the screen rather than hiding it. Identification is a starting point for your own judgement and a field guide, never a basis for eating anything.

NOTHING LEAVES YOUR PHONE

There is no account, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Your conversations, photographs, voice, documents and location stay on the device. The app touches the network only when you explicitly download an AI model, browse the live map, or save a map area.

WHAT YOU NEED

Atlas downloads an AI model the first time you use it — you choose which, from a few hundred megabytes upwards. A phone with 6 GB of RAM or more will run the larger models comfortably; smaller ones work on less. Model downloads and map packs need storage space and a connection at the time you download them, and nothing after that.

Built as doctoral research at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi.

Place names © GeoNames. Map imagery is attributed in the app to the provider you choose.