AI Vastu Compass - Free Online Vaastu Compass

There are two Norths. True North is geographic, the direction of the Earth’s axis, and the North a map grid is drawn against. Magnetic North is where a compass needle settles. The angle between them at your spot on the ground is the magnetic declination. An easterly declination is added to a magnetic bearing to get the true bearing; a westerly one is subtracted.

Declination is not one number for the whole country. It varies from place to place across India, stays small over much of the mainland at roughly a degree or two, and grows larger towards the far northeast and the far west. It also drifts slowly year on year, so a figure printed in an old book is not today’s figure. Look up a current value for your own city or coordinates in a geomagnetic calculator and enter it in the field above, rather than trusting a single fixed number quoted for all of India.

Which should you use? Traditional Vaastu in India is almost always done with a magnetic compass, so most practitioners work in magnetic North whether they say so or not. Architects and several modern schools prefer true North, since site plans are drawn to it. Since each Vaastu zone spans 45 degrees, a degree or two rarely moves a room between zones. It matters when your reading already sits within two or three degrees of a boundary such as 22.5 or 67.5 degrees, which is exactly where Ishan kon disputes start. Pick one convention, note it on the drawing, and keep it for the whole plan.

Ishan kon, the 22.5 to 67.5 degree slice highlighted in amber on the rose above, is the corner practitioners fuss over most. Classically it belongs to Ishana, an aspect of Shiva, and to the water element, which is why the pooja space, a borewell or an underground tank go there and why the corner is meant to stay light, clean and comparatively empty.

There is plain climatic logic under the symbolism. In the northern hemisphere the northeast gets soft early morning sun and almost no harsh afternoon heat, so it is the coolest quadrant of a building in the Indian climate. Keeping it open and low buys morning light and cross ventilation while the heat-loaded southwest carries the mass. Hence the specific instructions: no toilet, no heavy store or staircase, no septic tank, do not raise the floor or roof higher there than in the southwest, and do not cut the corner off in the plan shape.

Because Ishanya is only 45 degrees wide, an error of a few degrees in your reading can push a room in or out of it. That is the strongest argument for taking three careful readings instead of one quick one.

A phone has no needle. It has a magnetometer reading the local field in three axes, plus software that fuses that with the gyroscope and accelerometer to guess where the top of the phone points. That estimate degrades predictably: nearby ferrous metal distorts the field, magnets in cases, pop sockets and car mounts sit millimetres from the sensor, and the gyroscope contribution accumulates error, which is the slow rotation you see when the phone lies still. Waving a figure of eight forces a recalibration.

Indoors in a reinforced concrete building it is worse, because rebar in slabs, columns and beams forms a steel cage around you. A reading taken beside a steel door frame or a lift shaft can be off by more than a whole Vaastu zone.

Use a physical compass when the decision actually turns on the number: fixing the facing of a plot before construction, settling whether an entrance falls in one pada or the next, or resolving a reading near 22.5, 67.5, 112.5 or 157.5 degrees. A liquid-filled prismatic or baseplate compass, held on a non-metallic surface away from your body and outside the building line, is the right instrument there. The phone is fine for everything else.

A bearing on its own only tells you the facing. The useful work starts when you lay that North over the plan and see which zone each room actually occupies. That is what the Vaastu grid does: it divides the built-up area into zones so the kitchen, toilets, master bedroom, staircase and water sources can be checked against the directions in the table above rather than judged by eye.

Vaastu AI does that step for you. Upload the floor plan as a JPG, PNG or PDF up to 25MB, confirm which way is North in the compass and map step, and the AI detects the rooms and scores the layout against Vaastu principles. The free report gives an overall Vaastu score, a basic space analysis, an element balance overview, key recommendations and two AI chat replies. No signup is needed to try it, and it works in ten languages. See how the analysis works.

The premium report is a one-time payment per report, Rs 299 in India, not a subscription. It adds full directional analysis, room-by-room detail, energy-flow mapping, element mapping, specific remedies, prosperity zones, entrance optimisation and unlimited AI chat; the full currency list is on the pricing page. For context, an in-person Vaastu consultation in India for comparable coverage typically runs Rs 5,000 to Rs 50,000, and Rs 15,000 to Rs 50,000 for a 3-4 BHK. If you would rather ask questions in conversation, the online consultant page covers what the AI can and cannot answer, and Vaastu for flats handles the apartment case where the structure cannot change.