Wait, We Got Open Source Palantir Before GTA VI?

An ex-Google Maps PM just dropped a browser-based globe that tracks every plane, ship, satellite, and CCTV camera on Earth in real time — and put the whole thing on GitHub under an MIT license. The internet called it "vibe-coded Palantir." The actual co-founder of Palantir noticed.

Here is how a weekend project went from spy-thriller UI to open-source reality.

The demo that broke the internet

Three minutes into Bilawal Sidhu's YouTube walkthrough, he points at a military helicopter doing racetrack patterns over Fort Rucker, Alabama. The amber icon on the 3D globe isn't just a dot — it banks into actual turns, holding the training hold that every military pilot learns in initial contact school.

"Those loops are basically training patterns," he says.

That's when it stops feeling like a tech demo. The globe is not showing his data or his simulation. It is showing the real sky, right now, and you can ask it questions about what is happening.

The "vibe-coded Palantir" moment

Sidhu spent six years at Google building Immersive View — the photorealistic 3D Maps experience that lets you fly over a city before you visit. He has 2.1 million YouTube subscribers and runs a TED-curated channel on spatial computing. When the God's Eye View demo dropped, one commenter joked he had "vibe-coded Palantir."

Joe Lonsdale saw it too. Within 48 hours of the video going viral, Sidhu — now CEO of a stealth startup and an a16z scout — did something no defense contractor would ever do: he open-sourced the whole thing.

GitHub. MIT License. One Google Maps API key. That is it.

What you actually get

The app runs in your browser on a photorealistic 3D globe (Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles plus CesiumJS). Thirteen live data layers, ten of them free and keyless. Here is how the demo unfolds:

Minute 1 — Military training over Alabama. Military flight traffic rendered in amber (via adsb.lol). Click any aircraft and you are in its cockpit view, with augmented reality labels on everything within a 250 km radius — other aircraft, ships at sea, mapped installations.

Minute 2 — Austin, by voice command. "Take me to the Texas State Capitol." The camera glides there, orbits slowly. "Turn on the CCTV layer and annotate the grounds." Building outlines appear. "What monuments are nearby?" They are listed, marked, and connected with walking directions to the Tahhano Monument.

Minute 3 — Real traffic, real cameras. Over Austin, turn on the TomTom traffic layer. Congestion colors the streets. Click a jammed intersection and the app jumps to the nearest public camera — projected into the 3D city, not stuck on as a 2D embed.

Minute 5 — Infrastructure everywhere. Undersea cables near the Bahamas — 712 mapped routes you can dive beneath. Dams appear on demand in China (704 of them). Data centers (4,351), plotted globally. NASA fire detections flash red dots you can inspect.

Minute 7 — Orbit. Turn on the satellite layer and click the ISS. You ride along at orbital distance, orbit ring visible, watching it cross over Ukraine while ground tracks update via SGP4 propagation.

Minute 9 — Falcon 9 replay. Pick a recent launch, hit play, watch the ascent — scrubbable from 0.25x to 4x. Labeled RECONSTRUCTED ESTIMATE, since it is one.

Minute 11 — The voice whiteboard. "Draw the walking route from the Capitol to Zilker Park." A street-following path traces itself through the 3D city. "Fly it." The camera banks into turns like a drone shot.

Minute 13 — Radio. "Play a news radio station near Austin." An analog tuner appears. Drag the needle — the globe flies to each of the 750 worldwide broadcasters, one real place at a time.

How it is built

The stack is stripped down:

Vanilla JavaScript — no React, no Vue, no framework overhead
CesiumJS — the 3D globe engine
Vite — build tool
Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles — the planet (the one paid key)
OpenAI Realtime API — voice only (optional, $5 session cap)

No framework is the real statement. Sidhu could have shipped this as a Next.js app with a dozen dependencies. Instead, the entire app boots in 1.86 seconds on a laptop and the codebase is small enough to actually read.

The engineering that makes it feel real:

World-stable icons. Aircraft and ships point along their true real-world heading at every camera angle — not just on the current screen. Per-frame screen-space course projection. Most tracking apps break this when you tilt or pan.

Smooth motion from choppy data. Feeds arrive every 15 to 30 seconds. The globe renders one interval behind real time and interpolates between fixes using dead reckoning. No teleporting icons.

Honest satellites. SGP4 orbital propagation with GMST realignment keeps orbit rings locked to their satellites. The ISS does not slide across the sky like it is on greased glass.

Terrain-aware positioning. Entity heights run through a real vertical datum (geoid-aware, sampled against the rendered terrain mesh). Aircraft park on runways. Cameras stand on street corners. Nothing floats.

Quota-governed proxies. The paid feeds (OpenSky, TomTom) run behind cached, budget-governed proxies. An afternoon of exploring will not torch your API allowance.

The one thing you pay for

Google Maps. That is the only paid key you need. Google gives 1,000 free 3D-tile sessions per month — each good for up to three hours of rendering. A solo user rarely leaves the free tier. After that, about $6 per 1,000 sessions.

OpenAI voice is also metered, but the app enforces a hard $5 session cap and warns at $2.

Everything else — flights, ships, satellites, earthquakes, CCTV, radio, bikeshare, fire detections, space launches — is free. No account, no signup. Just open the app.

The Palantir comparison, unpacked

The joke landed because Palantir's whole thing is taking public data and making it look like a classified ops room. God's Eye View achieves the same aesthetic — FLIR overlays, tactical HUD, cockpit views — but the interface runs in your browser, under your control, and every line of code is inspectable.

Palantir builds enterprise software for government agencies. God's Eye View is a browser app any teenager with a laptop can clone, fork, and extend. That is why the comparison is almost too perfect. Sidhu took the look and feel of billion-dollar geospatial intelligence and made the entry fee zero, the distribution model GitHub.

The real cost of going back in time

Sidhu's closing admission:

"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."

The free layer does real-time only. Yesterday's traffic, last week's flight paths, historical fire perimeters? That is where enterprise contracts kick in. Sidhu's team at halfpixel.ai is building that part for paying customers. It will not be open source or free.

But the baseline — today, right now — is the real thing. Track anything moving on the planet. Ask questions in natural language. Annotate the world around you. Replay a rocket launch.

No people tracking — and that matters

Sidhu drew a 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."

In a landscape where every "open source OSINT" project pivots into surveillance-for-hire, that ethical boundary is as notable as the engineering.

Go break it

GitHub: github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view

It runs on public data, clear sources, and local-first execution. No secrets, no private datasets, no mystery scraping. Secret-bearing API keys (OpenAI, AISStream, OpenSky OAuth, TomTom, FIRMS) stay server-side — the browser only gets a short-lived session token.

Or, if you are not a developer: install Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor, and paste:

"Clone github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view and set it up. Walk me through the Google Maps key, set a billing alert and usage quota, and start the dev server. I am not a developer — explain as you go."

That one key is the whole entry fee. Everything else lights up from there.