God's Eye View setup: live 3D tracking globe

BEFORE YOU INSTALL IT

It opens with zero keys. Esri satellite imagery and keyless terrain load by default. Flights, military traffic, satellites, earthquakes, public cameras and radio all work before you touch the settings panel.

Two install paths, same app. Pinokio 8.2 or newer gives you a one-click install and start button on Windows, macOS or Linux. The terminal path needs Node 24.14 or newer, or 26.x, plus npm ci.

Traffic on roads is simulated. The README says it directly: road traffic is modeled along real roads from aggregate location data, not a live feed. CCTV camera poses and rocket trajectories are coarse estimates, not exact positions.

Photorealistic tiles cost extra. A Cesium ion token unlocks eligible personal, non-commercial 3D tiles for free. A metered Google Maps key is the direct, paid route with in-app place search. Provider quotas apply either way.

Licence, in plain English: MIT, declared in package.json. Free for commercial work, fine to fork or self-host, no obligation beyond keeping the licence file.

Honest limitIt shows you what public feeds already know, nothing more. A vessel with its transponder off, or a camera that never went online, does not exist on this globe any more than it exists on FlightAware.

Read the whole setup

Get the setup that works.

Drop your email and unlock the rest: what you need, the terminal install, the two keys worth adding and why, and what to do when a feed goes quiet.

One email. No follow-up unless I ship something that fits.

WHAT YOU NEED

Node.js 24.14 or newer, or 26.x, for the terminal path
Pinokio 8.2 or newer if you want the one-click path instead
Nothing else, no account or API key to open the globe with live public data

INSTALL

Terminal path, if you skip Pinokio

Clone it, install with the exact Node engine range in package.json, then run the setup doctor before the dev server. The doctor catches the Node-version mismatch before it becomes a confusing runtime error.

The install

terminalcloned repo

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

npm run doctor exists because the engine range is exact: Node 24.14 to under 25, or 26 and up. A Node install outside that range is the single most common reason the dev server refuses to start.

Prove itOpen the local dev URL and wait for the globe to render aircraft near a major airport. Contacts appearing within a few seconds means the live ADS-B feed connected.

CONFIGURE

Two keys, both optional

The in-app POWER UP panel is the intended way to add keys, it writes .env for you. .env.example is the reference if you are running headless or self-hosted.

.envmy values

# left blank: keyless Esri imagery loads instead GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY= # a Cesium ion token unlocks Google 3D tiles for free, non-commercial use

Setting	Default	Why I change it
GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY	empty	Client-exposed by design, visible in devtools. Restrict it by HTTP referrer in Google Cloud before you set it, not after.
Cesium ion token	none	Free for personal non-commercial use and gets you photorealistic 3D without a metered bill. Add this before a paid Google key, not instead of trying keyless first.

Scope ruleBoth API keys in this app are client-exposed by design, since they run in the browser. Restrict them at the provider (HTTP referrer, API restriction) rather than treating them as secret.

DAILY DRIVING

Click, track, talk

The interface rewards clicking around more than reading docs. Voice control is the one feature worth learning deliberately, since it is not obvious from the UI alone.

Click anything to track it. The camera locks on, draws a trail, and surfaces full metadata for that aircraft, ship or contact.
Speak to annotate. Voice whiteboard draws real boundary polygons, marks and routes onto the globe from spoken commands.
Share a live view. Camera position, style, layers and a tracked target all serialize into one URL, so a share is a handoff, not a static screenshot.

A tracked vessel or fire hands off to the nearest live public camera in one click, which is the feature that makes this feel like more than a map.

WHEN IT DRIFTS

Two failures, both configuration

Install fails under Pinokio

You are on Pinokio older than 8.2. Update Pinokio first; the maintainer's own v0.1.1 notes name this as the fix for the reported install failures.

No 3D tiles, only flat imagery

No Cesium ion token or Google Maps key is set. That is the keyless fallback working as designed, not a bug; add a key through POWER UP if you want photorealistic tiles.

macOS keyless launch./scripts/dev-fresh.sh crashed under the stock Bash 3.2 that ships on macOS before v0.1.1. Update to v0.1.1 or newer if you hit that specifically.

THE SHAPE OF IT

Where everything lives

.env / .env.exampleyour keys, all optional, all client-exposed docs/CURRENT-STATE.mdwhat is live right now versus in progress docs/KNOWN-ISSUES.mdthe maintainer's own list, read before filing a duplicate scripts/setup-doctor.mjsthe Node-version and environment check src/the Cesium globe, layers and voice-control logic

Nothing here writes to your machine outside the checkout. Deleting the folder removes the app and any .env you created inside it.

That is the whole setup

One clone, one optional key, and public flight, ship and camera data becomes one globe instead of a dozen tabs. Start keyless, add a Cesium token only once you actually want the photorealistic tiles.

Open on GitHub →

↑ Unlocks the moment you submit the form above.

See what is actually flying over your city.