🌐 God's Eye View

A spy-satellite simulator in your browser — then you realize the sources are public and the data is real.

Photorealistic 3D globe. Live aircraft, ships, satellites, earthquakes, traffic, and public cameras. Hands-free voice control powered by a realtime AI agent.

No place left behind.

▶️ From the project behind the viral God's Eye View series (formerly WorldView) — 5M+ on YouTube · 25M+ across socials

🏆 Reached #1 on GitHub Trending, daily and weekly · August 2026

#8 Product of the Day · Hunted by Chris Messina, creator of the hashtag

“pretty cool” — Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla and Brave · Featured on Pinokio

⚡ Start without API keys. Install with Pinokio or run locally from the terminal. Add optional keys inside the app. → Quick Start

🌍 Why This Exists

God's Eye View brings public signals into one explorable globe. Track the world live. Talk to it. Break it. Extend it.

Flight transponders, ship beacons, orbital elements, seismographs, and public cameras already tell us a lot about the world. God's Eye View puts them in the same place, so you can move between a global picture and an individual aircraft, ship, or street. It runs locally in your browser, with source code you can inspect and extend.

Half the magic is that it looks like a forbidden cockpit. The other half is that every line of code is inspectable.

Most feeds are live or regularly refreshed. Traffic is simulated along real roads using aggregate location data. CCTV camera poses and rocket launch trajectories are coarse estimates.

Start with the included data sources, then add your own. Each layer is a separate module.

🎛️ What This Thing Does

• 🛩️ Cockpit view: Ride inside a tracked flight — the camera holds the terrain under you all the way down.
• 📡 Contacts: A 250 km roster of everything near your target — step through live aircraft and drop into any cockpit.
• 🎯 Click-to-track anything: Camera locks on, draws a fading trail, surfaces full metadata — and a tracked fire or vessel hands you off to the nearest live camera in one click.
• 🖊️ Voice whiteboard: Speak annotations onto the world — real boundary polygons, marks, and routes.
• 🛫 3D hangar: Real per-class aircraft models — 787, ATR-72, Citation, Bell 206, MQ-9 — and a tracked contact swaps from glyph to 3D model as you close in.
• 🎨 Reskin reality: GLSL sensor looks over the normal globe — CRT, NVG, FLIR/thermal, Noir, Snow.
• 🟩 Detection overlay: Screen-space bounding boxes and IDs on everything in view.
• 🎖️ Military HUD: Tactical heads-up display with intelligence-style telemetry.
• 🌐 Global Context: Stage the full situational picture with one switch — and get your exact view back when you leave.
• 🎥 Scene director: Capture cinematic camera tours for clips and demos.
• 🔗 Share Links: Camera, style, layers, and even one tracked target serialize into a URL — a live target is a handoff, not a bookmark.
• 🏠 Reset Globe: One control — or one sentence — back to the full Earth.
• 🌦️ Weather: Animate GFS or ECMWF forecast wind, replay observed radar, satellite clouds and lightning on one timeline, and follow NHC/CPHC cyclone tracks. No key needed.
• 📷 Mapped ALPR cameras: License-plate-reader camera locations tagged in OpenStreetMap, one city at a time. Locations and tags only; no key needed.
• 🔭 Satellite passes: Ask by voice when any loaded satellite next rises over you: rise, peak and set times, and whether you can see it.
• 🔎 Analyst answers: Count, filter and rank satellites, datacenters and dams by voice, alongside flights, ships, fires and quakes; answers say when a feed is stale or on a fallback.
• 🧭 Tilt and North Up: Switch between straight-down and a 35° oblique, or put north at the top, while a tracked target stays centered.
• 🔍 Keyless search: Type coordinates or a bundled city or landmark to fly there with no network request; other names use Google when configured, then Photon and Nominatim.
• 📦 Shareable scenes: Import, preview and share Director scenes as files or bundles, with camera anchors, authored moves and data packs.
• 🌊 Nepal flood scene: Replay the Bhote Koshi flood: flood path, witness sources and before-and-after imagery (bundled data is non-commercial; see DATA_SOURCES.md).

⚡ Quick Start

Start without an account or API keys. Both paths open the same app with Esri satellite imagery and keyless terrain. OSM is the fallback if Esri is unreachable. Flights, military traffic, satellites, earthquakes, public cameras, radio, and launches are available without keys.

For photorealistic 3D, add a Cesium ion token for eligible personal, non-commercial use, or a Google Maps key for the direct, metered route and Google place search. Provider terms and quotas apply. Add keys through the app's POWER UP panel; Keys & Costs explains the options.

Already installed? Update to the latest version. Older versions query public OpenStreetMap Overpass servers, which now refuse them, so Traffic, Mapped Installations and ALPR stay empty until you update.

Path 1 — One click, no terminal

1. Install or update Pinokio to 8.2 or later.
2. Open God's Eye View in Pinokio.
3. Click Install, then Start.

Available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The Pinokio maintainer reports cross-platform testing of the fixed installer. The launcher installs the locked dependencies, finds a free local port, and opens the app.

Tried before and installation failed? Update Pinokio and try again. Version 8.2 fixes the launcher installation issue; details from the Pinokio maintainer.

Path 2 — Terminal / coding agent

Use Node.js 24.x (24.14.0 or later) or 26.x. The setup doctor warns about Node 25, which is end-of-life.

git clone https://github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view.git
cd gods-eye-view
npm ci
npm run doctor
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:4173. Choose Live Contacts, Space Missions, Environmental, or Explore Manually from the first-run panel.

macOS shortcut: ./scripts/dev-fresh.sh clears the Vite cache and pulls any configured keys straight from the Keychain. It starts keyless too.

Then power it up — in the app, not in a file

Keys are upgrades, not prerequisites. When you want one, click the POWER UP chip in the bottom-right corner: Provider Settings lists every supported key, what it switches on, and where to get it. Paste, hit SAVE KEYS, and the app restarts itself with the new capability on. Once everything is configured the chip reads POWERED UP — and if a compact layout hides it, ?setup=1 reopens the same panel.

• Where keys land: Pinokio → the app's ignored pinokio/ENVIRONMENT; a terminal clone → the repo-root .env. Either file is made owner-only before a secret is written into it. These are local plaintext files, excluded from Git; the app uses your keys to contact the providers.
• Keys you already have stay yours: values from your shell or the macOS Keychain show as configured externally and are read-only to the panel.
• What to get first: the free Cesium ion token (eligible personal, non-commercial use; current terms and quotas apply) for photorealistic 3D and world terrain; a Google Maps key only for the billing-enabled, metered route + Google place search; OpenAI when you want to talk to the world. Full map, costs included, in Keys & Costs.

The server binds to localhost on both paths, and Provider Settings answers requests only from your machine. Browser-side keys (Google Maps, Cesium ion) must be restricted at their providers — SECURITY.md shows how, and it carries the LAN-sharing rules alongside Keys & Costs.

🕐 The First Five Minutes

Choose a first-run mission, or try these in order. The GIFs show Google Photorealistic 3D; your starting basemap depends on the keys you've added.

1. Light up the sky. Take the Live Contacts mission (or turn on Flights yourself) — thousands of live aircraft, gliding on real telemetry, detection mesh already reading the scene. Click one: the camera locks on, a trail draws behind it, and its live telemetry card comes up.
2. Take the controls. Hit COCKPIT on your tracked plane and ride it down, switching sensors mid-flight: NVG into Ironbow FLIR.

1. Drop into a busy airport. Search one and descend to the taxiways with 3D aircraft on — grounded contacts, taxi trails, the whole apron working in real time.

1. Look through a public camera. Turn on Cameras over Austin, London, California, Finland, or Delaware (live video). The feeds aren't webcam embeds — they project into the 3D city. Cycle coverage to VIEWSHED and every camera draws its estimated coverage volume — where it reaches, and where it goes blind.

1. Track something in orbit. Turn on Satellites and click the ISS — you ride along at orbital distance, orbit ring and all.

1. Switch the optics. Tap 1–7 — CRT, NVG, FLIR — and the whole live planet re-renders through a different sensor.

1. Talk to it (needs an OpenAI key): "Take me to LAX and select the nearest airborne aircraft."
2. Come home. Hit Reset Globe — or just say "zoom out to a globe view."

Keyboard: 1–7 visual styles · H HUD · D detection · C cockpit · ` frame rate · Esc out. Trackpad pinch zooms the globe.

🛩️ The Cockpit

Every plane should let you do this.

Real-time cockpit mode, built from live flight data: the camera rides your contact with real terrain holding underneath, all the way down — sensor styles come along for the ride, and Contacts keeps the 250 km roster one click away: jump plane to plane and fall straight into the next cockpit.

The cockpit even carries its own briefing strip: nearby live signals, regional headlines, and real local weather — with an opt-in WX mode that renders volumetric clouds from actual observations around your aircraft.

Why cockpit mode exists: you're riding a real aircraft over real terrain — and you get to pick which sensor you see the world through.

🎙️ Talk to It

Voice needs an OpenAI key. Without one the entire app still runs — the mic button just reports voice is unavailable. The same key drives the AI HUD summary: a terse, five-word intelligence-style readout of the current view that regenerates as you move.

Click GEV MIC, grant the microphone, and just talk. This is more than a voice-controlled remote:

• 🧠 It knows what it's looking at. The agent pulls live scene context before answering — including coordinates, street names, active layers, and view scale. Ask "what city is this?" mid-flight and it knows.
• 🎯 Entity Q&A. Click any plane, ship, or datacenter and ask "what's this?" It answers using the object's live telemetry.
• 👁️ Visual grounding. At street level, it reads a viewport screenshot to identify legible signage and building names, and is instructed never to hallucinate labels.
• 🎬 Cinematic framing. "Show me the planes overhead" pulls the camera back, angles it, and frames the live traffic like a director.
• 🔒 Honest and secure. The agent only confirms actions that succeeded. Your OPENAI_API_KEY never touches the browser; the client only gets a short-lived session token.

Twenty-nine tools, four jobs — the commands below come straight from the product's voice test suite and tool playbook:

🎥 Direct it — drone-operator camera verbs:

🗣️ "Take me to Tokyo." · "Orbit around this area slowly." · "Draw the walking route from the Capitol to Zilker Park." → "Fly the route we just drew." · "Zoom out to a globe view."

🖊️ Annotate it — a whiteboard over the real world:

🗣️ "Outline the state of Texas." · "Annotate the Texas State Capitol and its grounds" — it draws the actual enclosing boundary, not a circle. · "How far is the Eiffel Tower from the Louvre?" — a connector arrow appears and it speaks the distance. Everything persists until you say "clear the map."

✍️ Or draw it yourself — DISPLAY ▸ Draw: pick Area, Line or Pin, click the vertices on the real world, double-click to finish, label it. Same whiteboard, same persistence, no microphone needed.

🔎 Interrogate it — analyst queries against the live layers:

🗣️ "How many flights are over Texas right now?" · "Which ships are headed to Oakland?" · "What is the biggest fire near Los Angeles?" · "Is anything flying above forty thousand feet?" · "When does the ISS pass over next?" · "How many datacenters are in view?"

🎛️ Operate it — the whole console, hands-free:

🗣️ "Switch to night vision and turn on the flights layer." · "Turn on the camera viewsheds." · "Play a news radio station near Austin." · "Track that plane." → "Enter Cockpit."

And the rapid-fire tier — one sentence each:

🗣️ "Show me global infrastructure." (stages the layers and pulls back to the globe) · "Play Orbital Watch." (a full cinematic scene) · "Set detection density to fifty percent." · "Next contact — helicopters only." (mid-cockpit) · "Show me space missions." · "Switch to OSM." · "Sharpen the image a touch." · "Switch to the tactical layout." · "What's turned on right now?"

Ask for radio near anywhere and the globe starts broadcasting — every station is a real place you can fly to.

🛰️ What's on the Globe

Nineteen layers and map sources. Seventeen have a keyless path. Some offer additional capabilities with a provider key. (🟢 no key · 🟡 free key · 🔴 metered.)

Weather, keyless. Wind animates 10 m forecast flow from NOAA GFS or ECMWF IFS, with an optional color field and a reading at map center. Rain radar, Satellite clouds and Lightning density are observations on one history timeline in the WEATHER panel (step back, Play, Latest); Cyclone advisories draw NHC and CPHC positions, forecast tracks and cones. On Google 3D Tiles the observed layers float above the city as translucent shells, sharpened around your view.

In the app, Data Layers groups them as Movement, Cameras, Infrastructure, Events, Weather and Utilities.

The basemap ladder — what each tier buys you:

The Space Missions layer replaying a Falcon 9 ascent — labeled RECONSTRUCTED ESTIMATE, scrubbable 0.25×–4×.

Also on the globe: neighborhood overlays · an optional cockpit WX cloud effect. Bundled static infrastructure: Datacenters (4,351), Dams (704), and Submarine Cables (712).

Missing a layer you want? Open an issue — or add it and send the PR.

🎖️ Field Missions

Once the basics click, run these:

🎙️ = voice missions — they need an OpenAI key.

Ask the planet: a military contact's last ~24 hours of real trace history, resolved as stacked 3D loops.

"Draw the walking route… now fly it" — banked turns, eased ends, the camera leading the path like a drone shot.

Walk the boneyard: rows of retired airframes, fully resolved in 3D.

🔧 Under the Hood

How the globe handles live data:

• World-stable icons. Aircraft and ships point along their true real-world heading at every camera angle — tracked or not, looking straight down or across the horizon — via per-frame screen-space course projection. No spinning, no viewport-locking.
• Smooth motion from choppy data. Live feeds arrive every 15–30s; the globe renders one interval behind real time and interpolates between known fixes. Dead reckoning fills the gaps.
• Honest satellites. SGP4 propagation with orbit rings that stay locked to their satellites via GMST realignment — no drift, no per-second flicker.
• Sits on the real ground. Entity heights are aligned to work with Google 3D tiles, so aircraft park on aprons and cameras stand on street corners instead of floating.
• Caching and request budgets. An OpenSky credit governor, a TomTom daily tile budget, and disk-cached TLEs reduce repeated requests. These controls do not replace provider quotas or billing controls.
• Server-side credentials. Every API that touches a private key (OpenAI, AISStream, OpenSky OAuth, camera frames) is brokered through a hardened server-side proxy with SSRF protection, response caps, and sanitized errors. The only keys the browser sees are Google Maps and Cesium ion (restrict both at the provider).
• No framework. Vanilla JavaScript, CesiumJS, and Vite — plus Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles for the planet and the OpenAI Realtime API for voice. Fast to read, fast to hack on.

src/
├── main.js                 # Bootstrap: Google 3D tiles, layer registration
├── ui.js                   # Runtime UI — panels, HUD, styles, control facade
├── hud.js                  # Intelligence HUD + AI scene summary
├── keySetup.js             # POWER UP panel — in-app provider keys (dev server only)
├── mapStackController.js   # Basemap switching — Google 3D / Esri / OSM / ion stacks
├── voice/                  # OpenAI Realtime session + 29 voice tools
├── layers/                 # Layer components — weather, wind, cyclones, transit, ALPR, …
├── data/                   # One module per layer + orchestration + context store
│   ├── iconOrientation.js  # Screen-projected headings + horizon cull
│   └── local_data/         # Bundled datasets (per-folder provenance)
└── scenes/                 # Cinematic scene director

See docs/CURRENT-STATE.md for the authoritative runtime reference.

🔑 API Keys

🟢 No key · 🟡 Free key · 🔴 Metered

Use POWER UP → Provider Settings to add keys. The tables below explain what each provider enables; none is required to start. See the setup instructions for storage and configuration details.

No key needed for Wind, Rain radar, Satellite clouds, Lightning density, Cyclone advisories, Mapped ALPR Cameras, Transit, Directions, Delaware live video, and coordinate or bundled-place search. A layer row waiting on a key names it.

Choose the capabilities you want

Six keys. Four have a free tier, and the two 🔴 ones are metered:

What the TomTom key buys you: rush-hour density painted on the city — then dive from the jam straight into the camera watching it.

Cherry on top

Add these if you need higher polling allowances.

npm run doctor reports Node/npm readiness, the primary provider routes, and where each configured provider was found without printing credential values. On macOS its Keychain-aware result previews ./scripts/dev-fresh.sh; plain npm run dev reads only explicit environment and Vite dotenv values. The OpenSky summary reports keyless anonymous access for explicit anon or an OAuth mode without a client pair, retains presence-only wording for a complete OAuth pair, and identifies selected Basic or auto mode without guessing which credentials runtime will accept. Basic and credentials-file modes remain advanced dev-fresh.sh configuration.

# Put keys in .env (see .env.example), or pass them as env vars:
OPENAI_API_KEY="…" AISSTREAM_API_KEY="…" npm run dev -- --host localhost --port 4173

# On macOS, store any of them in the Keychain and dev-fresh.sh pulls them in:
security add-generic-password -U -s "google-maps-api" -a "api-key" -w
security add-generic-password -U -s "openai-api"      -a "api-key" -w
security add-generic-password -U -s "aisstream-api"   -a "api-key" -w
security add-generic-password -U -s "firms-map"       -a "map-key" -w
security add-generic-password -U -s "cesium-ion"      -a "token"   -w

💸 What it actually costs

Honest numbers, roughly, as of mid-2026 — always check the provider pricing pages:

Google's direct 3D route is surprisingly generous: the first 1,000 Photorealistic 3D Tiles sessions each month are currently free, and one root request supports roughly three hours of rendering. A solo user exploring sparingly can realistically stay inside the free usage cap. Billing must still be enabled, so restrict the key and set a quota or budget alert. Check Google's current pricing before relying on these figures.

🧗 The floor is low on purpose

Everything above is the deliberately cheap baseline — enough to get a real taste of geospatial intelligence, GEOINT, and OSINT without ever talking to a sales team. You'll also notice the ceiling: terrestrial AIS goes quiet mid-ocean and satellite AIS costs real money; premium imagery, SAR, and the deeper commercial feeds live behind enterprise contracts. That's not a limit of the architecture — every layer here is a pattern you can point at your own data sources. This repo hands you the foundation; what you fuse into it is up to you.

🔒 Sharing an instance

By default nobody else can reach your server — it binds to localhost. To share on your LAN, opt in explicitly (npm run dev -- --host 0.0.0.0 --port 4173, or HOST=0.0.0.0 ./scripts/dev-fresh.sh on macOS/Linux) — but know that ⚠️ a LAN-visible server brokers your configured API keys to anyone who can reach it. Set the per-IP throttles (GEV_RATELIMIT_OPENAI_PER_MIN, GEV_RATELIMIT_GOOGLE_PER_MIN — see .env.example) and, before anything else, configure provider quotas, usage limits, and billing alerts: app-level throttles are not billing caps, and a budget alert alone does not stop spending. Full threat model in SECURITY.md.

Provider Settings is disabled when the server is shared, so remote users cannot access the key-entry panel.

Pinokio LAN and Cloudflare sharing remain disabled for this launcher. Use a separately reviewed authentication proxy if remote access is required. SECURITY.md explains the restrictions and threat model.

📋 Responsible & Open

God's Eye View runs on public data, clear sources, and local-first execution. No secrets, no private datasets, no mystery scraping — anything involving a private key is brokered server-side. It has the visual grammar of a classified ops room, built entirely from open signals and inspectable code.

The line. This project models events, assets, infrastructure, and systems — aircraft, vessels, satellites, fires, cameras, cities. It does not build features for named-person search, face recognition, or tracking individuals, and pull requests that cross that line won't be merged. People are not a query type here.

Come build it. This is the canonical live 3D client from the project that kicked off the recent wave of spatial-intelligence tools — and it's a canvas: the layers here are the signals one person could find and fuse. Add a city pack, a data source, a style, a voice tool. It's the window through which you see the world; bring that window to others.

Status: An evolving open-source client for exploration and learning — a fast, hackable foundation, not a hardened production service. Released under the MIT License. Bundled and live datasets carry their own terms — see DATA_SOURCES.md. Security model: SECURITY.md. Want to contribute? CONTRIBUTING.md.

Maintainers: Bilawal Sidhu and Sameh Khamis at Halfpixel.

_{Media note: the capture GIFs on this page show Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and live data layers, used promotionally with in-frame attribution; they aren't licensed for standalone reuse. See media provenance and permissions; full source terms in DATA_SOURCES.md.}

[!IMPORTANT] God's Eye View is an exploratory visualization of public and third-party data. Data may be delayed, incomplete, modeled, inferred, or wrong. Do not use it for flight or maritime navigation, emergency response, medical or health decisions, investment decisions, or other safety-critical or operational purposes. Verify important information with authoritative sources.

🧭 What's Next

First — thank you. To everyone who watched the God-view demos and went off to build their own, and to everyone who kept asking for the code: I'm grateful. And when I polled whether this should go open source, you weren't subtle about it:

So here it is. Step inside the spy-thriller cockpit — except the data is real — and let's turn this into our shared sandbox for making sense of the world, and have fun doing it. This repo is the baseline, it stays open, and the whole point is for you to break things and bolt on layers we haven't thought of yet.

One heads-up from the inside: build in this space for a week and you learn that the present is the cheap part. The moment you try to go back in time — tiling, serving, and scrubbing what happened and what changed at any real resolution — the data gets expensive and the compute gets brutal. That's the long game.

Update — a hosted version is coming. We originally planned to keep this repository as the open-source client and build a separate professional product. Then the launch happened, and the loudest request wasn't another feature — it was "just give me a link." So we're building an official hosted God's Eye View at Halfpixel: no installation, just open it in your browser. The hosted version is the easiest way into this open-source project. More soon.