A Real-Time Globe of Aircraft, Ships, and Satellites You Can Talk To
You've probably watched a flight tracker or a ship map at some point and thought it was neat, then closed the tab. What if all those signals lived on one globe instead — planes, vessels, satellites, earthquakes, cameras — and you could just ask it questions out loud? That's the premise behind God's Eye View, a browser-based project that pulls public data feeds into a single 3D globe you can explore and extend.
What It Does
God's Eye View is a photorealistic 3D globe that renders live aircraft, ships, satellites, earthquakes, traffic, and public cameras in one place. The project describes itself as a spy-satellite simulator that turns out to be built on public data — flight transponders, ship beacons, orbital elements, seismographs, and public camera feeds all flowing into the same view. It runs locally in your browser, and every layer is a separate module you can inspect or replace.
The interface is built for moving between scales. You can click any tracked object to lock the camera on it, draw a fading trail behind it, and pull up its metadata. From a global overview you can zoom down to a single aircraft, ship, or street-level camera. There's also voice control via a realtime AI agent, so you can interact with the globe hands-free rather than clicking through menus.
Why It's Cool
The data is real, and that's the whole point. The README is upfront that this looks like a forbidden cockpit but every line of code is inspectable — and the sources behind it are public. That framing matters. It's not a demo with fake dots; it's a viewer for signals that already exist in the world, assembled in one place.
The cockpit view is a genuinely fun idea. Ride inside a tracked flight and the camera holds the terrain under you all the way down. Add the 3D hangar — real per-class aircraft models like the 787, ATR-72, Citation, Bell 206, and MQ-9 — and a tracked contact swaps from a glyph to a 3D model as you close in. That's a nice piece of design: detail scales with your distance from the thing you're watching.
Click-to-track hands you off across layers. A tracked fire or vessel can send you to the nearest live camera in one click. That kind of cross-layer linking is where a unified globe earns its keep over a dozen separate map tabs.
The sensor reskins are a clever touch. GLSL shader looks — CRT, NVG, FLIR/thermal, Noir — sit over the normal globe. It's cosmetic, but it changes how you read the same data, and it's the kind of thing that makes an exploratory tool stick.
Honest about its limits. Traffic is simulated along real roads using aggregate location data, and CCTV camera poses and rocket launch trajectories are coarse estimates. The README says so plainly, which is refreshing — you know which layers to trust and which to treat as approximations.
How to Try It
You can start without any API keys. The quickest path is Pinokio, or you can run it locally from the terminal. Optional keys get added inside the app afterward.
- Install via Pinokio, or clone the repo and run it locally from your terminal.
- Open it in your browser and start with the included data sources.
- If you want more, add optional API keys inside the app — the README has a section covering keys and costs.
- From there, poke around: click-to-track something, drop into a cockpit, try the voice controls, and start swapping in your own layers.
The repository is at github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view, and there's a contributing guide if you want to build on it. Each layer being its own module means extending it is a realistic weekend project rather than a rewrite.
Final Thoughts
God's Eye View is best suited to developers who like poking at geospatial data and want a solid, inspectable foundation to build on — not a polished consumer product. The honest caveats about simulated traffic and estimated camera poses tell you the authors care more about accuracy of claims than about hype. If you've ever wanted to see public signals stitched together into something you can actually fly around in, this is a good place to start. Break it, extend it, add your own feeds.