bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view

🌐 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, with clearly labeled modeled views where a live feed is unavailable. 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

🌍 Why This Exists

You asked, so it's happening. God's Eye View is open source. Track the world live. Talk to it. Break it. Extend it.

Most open-source intelligence is a pile of browser tabs. The signals are abundant, but the interface is the bottleneck. God's Eye View turns those signals into a place: the world is already broadcasting — flight transponders, ship beacons, orbital elements, seismographs, public cameras — and this makes it visible on a photorealistic 3D Earth in real time. No classified clearance required; it's public signal all the way down, and the interface runs in your browser, under your control.

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

The live layers are grounded in public feeds: the airliner crossing your screen is reporting telemetry, the camera is installed at a published location, and the ISS position is propagated from current orbital elements. The client deliberately renders flights one polling interval behind real time so it can interpolate smoothly. Some experiences are modeled rather than live: keyless traffic is labeled as a simulation, camera poses are estimated until calibrated, and launch ascent playback is marked RECONSTRUCTED ESTIMATE. Each layer keeps its source and freshness state visible, including partial, delayed, simulated, and unavailable states.

🎛️ 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.

⚡ Quick Start

Requires Node.js 24.14.x or 26.x (enforced by package.json).

1. Copy .env.example → .env and set GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY.
2. Install and run:

npm install
npm run dev -- --host localhost --port 4173

3. Open http://localhost:4173. Cold start settles in under two seconds on a recent laptop (median 1.86 s in a point-in-time M5/Chrome capture — docs/PERFORMANCE.md; a comparison baseline, not a hardware requirement). A first-run card offers to stage a mission for you — Live Contacts, Space Missions, Environmental — or leaves you to explore manually.

[!TIP] Not a coder? Have an AI do this whole page for you. A one-click installer is in the works — until then, install a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or Antigravity) and paste this:

Clone https://github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view and set it up on my machine.
Install everything it needs, walk me through getting the required Google Maps API
key step by step (plus any optional free keys I want), put the keys in .env, and
help me set a billing alert and a usage quota on the Google key so I can't
overspend. Then start the dev server and open it in my browser. I'm not a
developer — explain what you're doing as you go, and ask me before any step
that could cost money.

That one key is the whole entry fee. Everything in this README is color-coded — 🟢 needs nothing · 🟡 free key · 🔴 metered — and Google Maps is the only 🔴 you need: it buys the photorealistic planet, and most of the globe lights up 🟢 from there. For typical solo exploring, expect $0 on most layers and pocket change on the metered two: Google currently gives 1,000 free 3D-tile sessions a month — each good for up to three hours of rendering, which is very hard for one person to exhaust — and voice carries a built-in $5 session cap. Full map in Keys & Costs, full honest breakdown in What it actually costs.

The dev server binds to localhost — your keys stay on your machine. Sharing on a LAN safely is covered in Sharing an instance and SECURITY.md.

macOS shortcut: ./scripts/dev-fresh.sh clears the Vite cache and pulls your keys straight from the Keychain.

🕐 The First Five Minutes

No account, no signup. The first-run card will offer to stage a mission for you — or run this gauntlet yourself. Somewhere in these five minutes it stops feeling like a demo:

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. The cockpit 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 — and Contacts keeps the 250 km roster one click (or one sentence) away: jump plane to plane and fall straight into the next cockpit.

3. 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.

4. Look through a public camera. Turn on CCTV over Austin, London, or California. 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.

5. Paint the streets with rush hour. Turn on Traffic and dive below ~8 km — per-vehicle flow colors to the real jams (with a TomTom key; keyless it's a labeled simulation). Then hit NEAREST in the CCTV panel and watch the jam through the camera pointed at it.

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

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

8. Talk to it (needs an OpenAI key): "Take me to LAX and select the nearest airborne aircraft."
9. 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 · Esc out.

🎙️ 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-eight 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."

🔎 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?"

🎛️ 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 Bing aerial." · "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

Thirteen live layers. Ten of them need nothing at all — no key, no account, no signup.

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.

Launch replay: a Falcon 9 ascent, labeled RECONSTRUCTED ESTIMATE, scrubbable 0.25×–4×.

Trace the backbone: the submarine cable routes under the Bahamas.

🔧 Under the Hood

Some of the engineering that makes it feel real rather than like a tech demo:

• 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 run through a real vertical datum — geoid-aware, sampled against the rendered terrain mesh — so aircraft park on aprons and cameras stand on street corners instead of floating.
• Spends your quota like it's its own. The paid feeds run behind cached, budget-governed proxies — an OpenSky credit governor, a TomTom daily tile budget, disk-cached TLEs — so an afternoon of exploring doesn't torch an API allowance.
• Local-first key handling. Secret-bearing providers such as OpenAI, AISStream, OpenSky OAuth, TomTom, and FIRMS are brokered server-side. Proxy destinations are fixed or allowlisted, and the higher-risk paths add bounded requests, timeouts, response caps, and sanitized errors as appropriate. The only provider credentials intentionally exposed to the browser 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
├── mapStackController.js   # Google 3D / Bing / OSM switching
├── iconOrientation.js      # Screen-projected world-space headings + horizon cull
├── voice/                  # OpenAI Realtime session + 28 voice tools
├── data/                   # One module per layer + management + context store
│   └── local_data/         # Bundled datasets (per-folder provenance)
└── scenes/                 # Cinematic scene director

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

🔑 API Keys

The legend, one more time: 🟢 no signup — works out of the box · 🟡 free key — register, paste, done · 🔴 metered — a billing-enabled account; costs are small but real.

Most of the globe is 🟢: flights (anonymous), military traffic, satellites, earthquakes, CCTV, radio, bikeshare, space missions, mapped installations, and every bundled dataset run with zero keys.

What you need for the good experience

Five keys cover the fully keyed experience. Three currently offer no-cost developer access; Google Maps and OpenAI are usage-metered. Provider prices and allowances change, so use the linked pricing pages before relying on a budget estimate:

What the TomTom key buys you: step 5 of The First Five Minutes for real — actual rush-hour density painted on the city instead of an approximate simulation.

Cherry on top

All of them are worth getting. None of them are required to start.

# 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 you can also keep any key in the Keychain and ./scripts/dev-fresh.sh pulls them in — the security add-generic-password service names are documented in .env.example.

OpenSky can run fully anonymous (OPENSKY_AUTH_MODE=anon), or import OAuth credentials with ./scripts/opensky-import-client.sh /path/to/credentials.json.

💸 What it actually costs

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

🧗 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, set provider-side budget caps (Google Cloud budgets, OpenAI usage limits): the throttles are app-level guards, not billing caps. Full threat model in SECURITY.md.

📋 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.

_{Media note: Bilawal Sidhu created and owns the 17 capture GIFs on this page. He also published the two README PNGs in the existing public project and authorized their continued inclusion here. Any appearance by Bilawal is included with his permission. These files are project documentation, not MIT-licensed standalone assets. Platform interfaces, trademarks, avatars, data, and third-party imagery visible within them remain subject to their respective owners' terms. See media provenance and source terms.}

[!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. For that, we're building something cool. More in the future — halfpixel.ai.