How to use God's Eye View

Flying the globe

The globe responds the way you expect from a 3D map. Drag anywhere to spin it. Scroll or pinch to zoom, and pull the right mouse button (or use two fingers) to tilt the camera down toward the horizon. Tilting matters more than people expect: at a straight-down view, depth is invisible, but from near the horizon you can read altitude and distance properly.

Press O to start an automatic orbit. The planet keeps turning on its own, which is useful when you are watching a layer update rather than actively steering. Press O again to take back control.

Layers versus map stacks

These are two separate controls and it is worth understanding the difference before you start.

A map stack is the imagery beneath everything: Google 3D photorealistic tiles, Bing Aerial, Esri Satellite, Bing Labels or OpenStreetMap. A layer is a data overlay drawn on top: live aircraft, satellites, earthquakes, fires, cameras, radio and so on.

Changing the map stack never disturbs your data layers, so you can flip between imagery styles to make one dataset easier to read. Esri Satellite and OpenStreetMap both work without any key. Google 3D needs a Google Maps key, and the Bing stacks need a Cesium ion token.

Turning on live data

Press F to open the layers panel. Every layer is independent and layers stack, so you can run aircraft, satellites and earthquakes at once. Here is the quickest useful combination to start with:

1. Open the panel with F and enable Satellites — this works with no key.
2. Enable Military Flights to see aircraft highlighted separately from the rest.
3. Enable Earthquakes (24h) and zoom out to a hemisphere view. The Ring of Fire appears on its own.
4. Click any aircraft, satellite or earthquake to pin it and read its details.
5. Press C with an aircraft selected to enter Cockpit view and fly from inside the aircraft.

The Global Context layer is derived rather than fetched. It builds a roster of things near your current camera position from the layers you already have switched on, so it only becomes useful once flights, vessels or installations are visible.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcuts are ignored while you are typing in a search box or a select, so you can search for a city without the globe reacting. Esc is the exception and always works.

There are also contextual keys that only apply while something specific is open: Enter finishes a drawing or confirms a search, Backspace removes the last vertex while drawing, and Tab cycles within the open surface.

What actually needs an API key

This is the part most write-ups get wrong, so here is the honest split. The majority of the app is keyless.

Works with no key at all

Basemaps (Esri Satellite, OpenStreetMap), terrain, Satellites via CelesTrak, Military Flights via adsb.lol, Earthquakes via USGS, Radio via Radio Browser, Street Traffic road geometry via OpenStreetMap Overpass, Bikeshare via GBFS, Transit via GTFS-Realtime, CCTV from public municipal camera feeds, Directions via OSRM, Mapped Installations, ALPR Cameras, Space Missions via Launch Library 2, and everything bundled offline: Submarine Cables, Datacenters, Dams and Astronomy.

Upgrades that do need a key

• Live Flights (full commercial coverage) — OpenSky OAuth client credentials. Without them the layer falls back to the keyless adsb.lol point feed.
• Live AIS Vessels — an AISStream API key.
• FIRMS Active Fires — a free NASA FIRMS MAP_KEY.
• Real traffic flow — a TomTom API key. Without it the traffic layer runs a built-in simulation, which is clearly labelled as simulated.
• Google 3D basemap and Google place search — a Google Maps key. Esri or OSM are used instead without one.
• Bing basemaps — a Cesium ion token.
• Voice control and the AI HUD summary — an OpenAI API key. The rest of the app runs without it; only the microphone button is disabled.

On a local install these are entered in the app under POWER UP → Provider Settings, which writes them to a .env file. That panel is a local-install feature only — it is intentionally not available on a public deployment, so you cannot write secrets into someone else's hosted instance.

Running your own copy

The project is MIT licensed and runs from source on Windows, macOS or Linux.

1. Clone the repository.
2. Install Node.js 24.14 or newer, or Node 26. Node 25 is end-of-life and the setup doctor will flag it.
3. Run npm ci, then npm run doctor to check the environment.
4. Run npm run dev and open http://localhost:4173.
5. Add any provider keys you want under POWER UP → Provider Settings.

Use npm ci rather than npm install if you want the exact locked dependency tree. If you plan to submit changes, the project expects npm run build, npm test and npm run test:track to stay green.

Voice control

Voice is an optional OpenAI-powered feature. When a key is configured you hold Space to talk and release to send. The model exposes 28 tools, so it can genuinely steer the globe rather than just answer questions — fly to a named place, select the nearest aircraft, zoom to the globe, open or close a panel, switch visual style, change map stack, track or stop tracking an entity, control a CCTV camera, tune the radio, draw an annotation on the map, and fetch the next ISS pass.

Two tiers are available and switchable in the mic panel: the standard model (gpt-realtime-2) and a cheaper mini model (gpt-realtime-2.1-mini). Because audio conversation costs real money, there is a built-in guard that warns at $2 of cumulative spend and ends the session at $5.