God's Eye View Setup: Self-Host the Live 3D Spy Globe

God's Eye View is a free, open source browser app that renders live flights, ships, satellites, wildfires and public cameras on a photorealistic 3D globe, and it is the second-hottest repository on GitHub today with nearly 2,000 stars added in a single day on top of more than 7,500 total. Everything runs from your own machine: clone it, add one Google Maps key, and you have a self-hosted OSINT cockpit instead of a subscription dashboard.

• Built by Bilawal Sidhu, creator of the viral God's Eye View YouTube series, as the open sourced version of that project's client.
• Ten of thirteen live data layers need zero API key at all: flights, military traffic, satellites, earthquakes, CCTV, radio, bikeshare, space launches and more.
• Only one key is required to start: Google Maps, for the photorealistic 3D tiles. Google gives 1,000 free tile sessions a month, each covering up to three hours of rendering.
• MIT licensed, vanilla JavaScript plus CesiumJS and Vite, no framework lock-in, and every secret-bearing key is brokered on a local server rather than shipped to the browser.

The exact steps, start to finish

1. Check prerequisites. God's Eye View needs Node.js 24.14.x or 26.x (pinned in package.json), plus git:

   node --version
   npm --version
   git --version

2. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view
   cd gods-eye-view

3. Install dependencies:

   npm install

4. Create your .env file from the template the repo ships with. Windows (PowerShell):

   Copy-Item .env.example .env

   Windows (cmd.exe):

   copy .env.example .env

   macOS/Linux:

   cp .env.example .env

5. Get the one required key: Google Maps. This is the only key you need to start, everything else on the globe works without one. Go to console.cloud.google.com, create (or select) a project, and enable billing on it, Google's Map Tiles API requires a billing-enabled project even though normal solo use stays inside the free tier. Then enable the Map Tiles API for that project and create an API key under APIs & Services → Credentials. Check current pricing at developers.google.com/maps/billing-and-pricing/pricing before relying on the free-tier estimate, and restrict the key (HTTP referrer + API restriction) since it ships to the browser by design.
6. Paste the key into .env and save the file:

   GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY=your_google_maps_api_key_here

   Replace the placeholder with the real key you just created.
7. Start the dev server:

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

8. Open it and see it work. Go to http://localhost:4173 in your browser. A first-run card offers to stage a mission for you, Live Contacts, Space Missions or Environmental, or you can turn on a layer yourself and explore manually. Cold start is under two seconds on a recent laptop.

What is God's Eye View and why is it trending?

God's Eye View turns public data feeds into a single photorealistic 3D Earth you can fly around in a browser tab. It stitches together OpenSky and adsb.lol for live aircraft, AISStream for ships, CelesTrak for satellites propagated with SGP4, USGS for earthquakes, TomTom for traffic, and roughly 800 public CCTV cameras across Austin, California and London, all projected onto Google's Photorealistic 3D Tiles. An optional voice agent, powered by the OpenAI Realtime API, lets you say things like "take me to Tokyo" or "which ships are headed to Oakland" and watch the camera respond. The repository launched in June 2026 as the open source release of the client behind Sidhu's popular YouTube demos, and the spike this week is the open sourcing itself landing on trending: a tool that used to be a closed demo is now something anyone can clone and run tonight.

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How do you install and run God's Eye View?

The setup is the same three commands on Windows, macOS or Linux, since the whole app is a Node and Vite project with no native build step. You need Node.js 24.14.x or 26.x, matching the range pinned in package.json.

# clone and install (Windows, macOS, Linux)
git clone https://github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view
cd gods-eye-view
npm install

Before starting the dev server, copy .env.example to .env and set GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY from the Google Cloud Console, with the Map Tiles API enabled. That single key is what the README calls "the whole entry fee": everything else on the globe is optional.

# start the local server
npm run dev -- --host localhost --port 4173

Open http://localhost:4173 and a first-run card offers to stage a mission for you, Live Contacts, Space Missions or Environmental, or you can explore manually. The README clocks a cold start under two seconds on a recent laptop. macOS users get a shortcut, ./scripts/dev-fresh.sh, which clears the Vite cache and pulls any keys already saved in the Keychain instead of a plaintext .env file.

Which live layers work without any API key?

This is the detail most trending-repo writeups skip: ten of the thirteen layers are keyless by design. Live flights (anonymous OpenSky plus adsb.lol), military ADS-B traffic, satellites from CelesTrak, USGS earthquakes, the CCTV mesh, world radio, bikeshare availability, space launches from Launch Library 2, mapped military installations from OpenStreetMap, and the bundled datasets, 4,351 datacenters, 704 dams, 712 submarine cables, all light up with zero signup. Three layers get meaningfully better with a free key: AISStream unlocks live ship tracking, NASA FIRMS unlocks active fire detections, and TomTom swaps an approximate traffic simulation for real per-vehicle congestion. Voice control is the one feature gated entirely behind a metered key, OpenAI's Realtime API, and the app runs fine without it, the microphone button just says voice is unavailable.

How much does it actually cost to self-host?

For solo exploring, expect close to nothing. Google's 3D tiles bill by root tileset request rather than by tile, so one request buys up to three hours of unlimited rendering, and the first 1,000 requests a month are free, roughly $6 per 1,000 after that on US pricing. A single person rarely leaves the free tier. OpenAI voice is the other metered layer: the app shows a running cost estimate mid-session, warns at $2, and enforces a hard $5 session cap. Every other layer, AISStream, FIRMS, TomTom, Cesium ion, is a free-tier signup rather than a bill.

How do you talk to the globe instead of clicking it?

Add an OPENAI_API_KEY to .env, click the GEV MIC button, and grant microphone access. The voice agent has 28 tools across four jobs: directing the camera ("orbit around this area slowly"), annotating the map with a real drawn boundary or route, interrogating the live layers ("how many flights are over Texas right now"), and operating the whole console hands-free. Your OpenAI key never reaches the browser; the client only gets a short-lived Realtime session token, the same server-side brokering pattern the rest of the app uses.

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How does it compare to the tools people already use for this?

Flightradar24 still wins on flight-tracking depth and mobile polish; Google Earth wins on offline-friendly terrain. God's Eye View's angle is fusion, one 3D scene layering flights, ships, satellites, fires and cameras together, backed by code you can read and extend.

What are the gotchas before you rely on it?

A few things worth knowing before your first session. First, this is not a navigation or safety tool: the README states plainly that data may be delayed, incomplete, modeled or wrong, and warns against using it for flight or maritime navigation, emergency response, or any safety-critical decision. Second, some layers are simulated rather than live when you skip their key: keyless traffic renders as a labeled approximation, camera poses are estimated priors you calibrate by dragging a gizmo, and launch ascent playback is marked "reconstructed estimate," so read the on-screen labels rather than assuming everything is a live feed. Third, if you expose the server on your LAN with --host 0.0.0.0, anyone who can reach it can spend your configured API budget, so set the per-IP rate limit env vars and a provider-side billing alert first. Fourth, the project draws an explicit ethical line: it models aircraft, ships, satellites and infrastructure, not people, and pull requests adding named-person search or face recognition will not be merged.

Our take

The interesting decision here is not the 3D globe, Cesium demos have looked like this for years, it's the key-brokering architecture underneath it. Most weekend OSINT projects ship every API key straight into the browser bundle and call it done. This one runs a real local server, proxies the metered providers, caches aggressively, and budgets quota so an afternoon of exploring does not blow through a free tier by accident. That is the difference between a fun demo and something worth trusting on your own machine for a week. Ten keyless layers out of thirteen also mean most people get the full spectacle, thousands of live aircraft, satellites, earthquakes, cameras, on the first run before creating a single account. The ceiling is honest too: terrestrial AIS goes quiet mid-ocean, and the deeper commercial feeds live behind enterprise contracts the README doesn't pretend to replace. For a weekend project that turns public data into something you can fly through, this is the best version of that idea on GitHub right now.

Original analysis by GenZTech. Tool documentation: bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view on GitHub.