Bilawal Sidhu: God's Eye View passed 41,000 stars
He put the spy-thriller globe on GitHub. It went to number 1.
Bilawal Sidhu open-sourced God's Eye View on 25 August 2026. The repository held 40,949 stars and 8,307 forks on 22 September 2026. He had spent six years at Google on maps. The readme says people are not a query type.
He learned the want at eleven, in front of a render.
Bilawal Sidhu says he fell in love with computer graphics at 11 and taught himself 3D animation and visual effects. The hobby never left. On his own about page he still describes the work as connecting bits and atoms, and blending reality with imagination.
Years later he made a documentary on Google Earth. The detail he keeps is small. The first thing people did with a free globe was not the pyramids. They looked at the roof over their own head. That is the want underneath God's Eye View: a window you can stand inside, pointed at the place you already know.
God's Eye View is that roof, with live aircraft on it.
Six years inside the map, four of them on Maps.
In an essay on 4 March 2026 he wrote that he spent six years at Google, four of them on Maps. The products he names are the ARCore Geospatial API, Immersive View, and 3D mapping at global scale: satellite, aerial, and ground imagery fused for public and private use. A December 2022 note from the same newsletter puts him on the Map the World team at Google Geo, shipping world-scale visual positioning. Gorillaz used that API for an augmented concert in Times Square and Piccadilly Circus.
He also says a full team used to spend a quarter on the kind of fusion he later did from a couch in a weekend. That sentence is his, and it is the bridge from the job to the repository.
WorldView was a weekend. God's Eye View is the name that stuck.
On 4 March 2026 he described WorldView as a geospatial command centre that fused open-source feeds onto a 3D globe, built while he reconstructed the Iran strikes he calls Operation Epic Fury. Satellites, flights, airspace closures. Public caches, before they cleared. One person, he wrote, joked that he had vibe-coded Palantir.
The joke names the unease. A globe that tracks planes, ships, satellites, and public cameras feels like a service that used to sit behind a clearance. The skin is a spy thriller on purpose. He said so when he released the code: the aesthetics are having fun, and the data underneath is real.
On 25 August 2026 he put it on GitHub under the name God's Eye View, MIT license, copyright 2026 Bilawal Sidhu. The readme says the project was formerly WorldView. It also draws a line, in his words: "People are not a query type here." The same file says the project does not build named-person search, face recognition, or tracking of individuals, and that pull requests which cross that line will not be merged.
By 19 September 2026 he was counting roughly 38,200 stars and 7,700 forks, a 30 minute walkthrough at 2.3 million views in a week, and a Product Hunt post from Chris Messina. On 22 September 2026 the GitHub API read 40,949 stars and 8,307 forks. The maintainers named in the readme are Bilawal Sidhu and Sameh Khamis, at Halfpixel. A hosted globe there is promised. The readme still says more soon.
The globe is one project. The habit is older.
Map the World is the newsletter and the name he uses for the whole practice, at spatialintelligence.ai and maptheworld.ai. The about page calls him technology curator and host for TED. In a 4 July 2025 essay he dates that in order: a TED talk in 2023, The TED AI Show in 2024, technology curator for TED2025. He writes that he curated 10 main-stage talks and interviewed Eric Schmidt on that stage. He also describes himself there as an angel investor and a venture scout for Andreessen Horowitz, and he lists Pika Labs and Hedra among the cheques.
see-through-walls is the other public repository. GitHub describes it as multiplayer augmented reality on MultiSet's visual positioning, phones and Ray-Ban glasses, so a tracked thing stays visible through a wall. MIT license. On 22 September 2026 it had 369 stars and 115 forks. The last push on the default branch was 25 April 2026.
In July 2025 he published a 33 minute documentary, The Untold Story of Google Earth. Keyhole, the startup Google bought, had sold the globe at about $800 a year. Google Earth went free in June 2005. The film is him returning to the tool that trained the want.
Wunderglobe is a fork of God's Eye View under that same MIT license. The globe at wunderglobe.com/play is one reading of his window: a matrix street map as the default, this magazine beside it, a ground colour you can change. His repository stays the upstream.
What is counted, what is his claim, what was a joke.
Where the sentences come from.
- God's Eye View repository, including the readme line on people, the Halfpixel maintainers, and the MIT license file.
- I Open Sourced God's Eye View, Bilawal Sidhu, 25 August 2026.
- God's Eye View Blew Up. Then Astra Showed Up., Bilawal Sidhu, 19 September 2026.
- The Intelligence Monopoly Is Over, Bilawal Sidhu, 4 March 2026.
- About, Map the World by Bilawal Sidhu.
- TED2025 Behind The Scenes, Bilawal Sidhu, 4 July 2025.
- The Untold Story of Google Earth, Bilawal Sidhu, 18 July 2025.
- see-through-walls.
- Geospatial AR and Gorillaz, Bilawal Sidhu, 18 December 2022.
Research for this piece was done on 22 September 2026.
No place left behind. Start with the roof.