When I open sourced God’s Eye View, I wanted people to build things into it that I hadn’t thought of. After all, we are building the collective window through which we see the world.
And let me tell you, the GEV community has been cooking! There’s world class weather layers, recent global satellite imagery for any given point, real-time transit tracking, WAY more public cameras, MCP support, and a way to plug in your own SDR (software defined radio) to do some very fun things.
The latest release put us back on the top of GitHub trending, behind the exceedingly viral reverse engineer anything (REA) project. Kinda blew our minds TBH.
To get a run down of all the latest features; watch the video below or read on!
Jump to weather (0:40), satellite comparisons (10:26), your own aircraft receiver (14:38), or Director Mode (20:32).
What’s New in God’s Eye View 0.2.0
1. World class weather monitoring
One of the most dynamic phenomenon humans contend with every day is the weather. It’s both global and local at the same time, so the new weather panel lets you turn on wind layers from the two popular models with the usual bells and whistles.
You can layer in geo-stationary satellite imagery to give you clouds. Rain radar to give you reflectivity, lightning density for where things are getting spicy. And of course, cyclone advisories, including published tracks and forecast cones for where they might go next.
Add aircraft and ships and suddenly you can see the global fleet navigating the weather, all on the same 4D globe. And indeed since I say 4D, I do mean you can scrub the cloud imagery backwards in time and of course go forward in time looking at published predictions.
There are so many amazing paid services out there to monitor the weather, and I’m really pleased with how well the community has managed to offer otherwise premium capabilities at no cost through our self hosted open source release — pulling together the amazing work done for public benefit from the likes of NOAA, NASA, and ESA.
The weather integration and release notes document the work behind that panel. Keep an eye on the clock as you explore: the cloud image, modeled wind, forecast advisory, and aircraft feed can refer to different times. Scrubbing one layer doesn’t rewind everything else.
Pull recent satellite imagery with a a few clicks.
In Recent Imagery, you can now draw a bounding box around a fire and it’ll retrieve the satellite images of that area. Now you can see the Sentinel-2 image draped on top of the 3d terrain.
You can swap out recent imagery with the arrow keys, check the dates and cloud cover, and drag the divider to compare it with the basemap.
You can also grab two dated images, make one your A and the other your B, and compare what’s changed. This is all keyless by the way. You don’t even need an API key to do this, ladies and gentlemen.
This kind of geospatial capability was just so hard to play with, and now it’s exceedingly easy. Most importantly, you can do it in the context of all the other layers we have, which is where the real magic is. The data sources are here if you wanna go deeper.
An extremely overkill public transit tracker
In Boston, click the transit layer and you can see the locations of buses and trams all across the city. Click one and it’ll start leaving a trail.
This might be the most overkill way to track your bus, but hey, if that’s what you want to do, you can do it now. We’re pulling this on the fly from the various municipal authorities - also fully keyless.
People have been adding cameras in all the places they live. Austin, Oakland, Sacramento, London, Finland. You can hit Next and jump around the world. In Sussex County, we even have video clips. This obviously isn’t available everywhere, but where it is, it’s pretty damn cool.
We also have mapped ALPR cameras courtesy of OpenStreetMap and the community. If there’s heading information available, you can visualize that on the map.
Plug in the radio on your desk
The public aircraft feeds come from a volunteer network — folks with software defined radios and little antennas receiving ADS-B signals from planes flying overhead and aggregating that together.
Now you can connect your own software defined radio and visualize everything you’re detecting in God’s Eye View. The SDR nerds, they know all the other possibilities — and we’ll go deeper into this in future editions.
Reconstruct real world events
Using the latest MCP server, you can now ask your agent to help you make real world event reconstructions.
For instance, using recorded ADS-B data, you can also visualize a flight from the third-person perspective and jump into a rendered cockpit view — I did this recreation of the recent FlyDubai incident, and see just how close it was to utter disaster.
While we’re on the topic of recreations, it’s important to note that we’re never going to pretend to give you the truth. Take the FlyDubai incident — unless you get the actual onboard black box and telemetry, there’s a lot you won’t know. But using publicly and commercially accessible data, we can get closer to what went down and form our own opinions.
Build a scene someone else can open
A lot of you are using God’s Eye View to explain things. You’re taking screenshots, putting it into slideshows, doing all sorts of storytelling about spaces, places and events happening in the world. Now you can draw outlines, sketch paths and start dropping your annotations on the map.
In Director Mode, the community-made Nepal example steps you through the flood: where it happened, the observations, and the route it took.
Tell your agent, “Go look at the reference implementation that’s in the scene editor.” It can help you author things like this, and then you can screen-record them.
Right now you have to use your own cloud storage for source media and imagery. You can even load in embedded YouTube or X videos without downloading them. A lot of these videos get geolocated by folks on Twitter. Pull all that in and see it in context, which I think is exceedingly powerful.
Ask your agent to update GEV
If you haven’t updated in a minute, grab the code and setup guide, or try the Pinokio installer. Most layers need no keys; Google 3D and Gemini/OpenAI voice require additional setup. If you don’t wanna deal with any of that, join the waitlist for the hosted version.
If you’re not a coder and don’t want to deal with pull requests, you can just come up with really cool ideas. Create an issue. Or heck, contribute a PR and build it yourself.
And most importantly: Thank you to all our contributors for helping build this collective window through which we see the world.
There are SO many other PRs out there, it’s honestly a little overwhelming for us — slowly growing the team to figure out how to integrate all these amazing data layers and features. Signing off, and I’ll see y’all in the next one.
-Bilawal
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