Artificially generatedWho the Heaven is Bilawal Sidhu
Google Earth plus Palantir, in your browser, with your data sources.
Bilawal Sidhu spent six years building Google Maps in 3D. In February 2026 he spends a weekend gluing live aircraft, ships, satellites and public cameras onto the same globe. People say he vibe-coded Palantir. A Palantir co-founder answers: he is missing real data fusion. Then the Iran strikes fly, and Sidhu reconstructs them in 4D from the couch. Late August he puts the code on GitHub. 12,600 stars in a week. This is not a classified console. It is a level of map everyday people could not reach before.
Watch the globe before you read us on the man.
Below, the open-source video, 24 August 2026: We Got Open Source Palantir Before GTA 6. Under that, the Iran reconstruction, 1.9 million views. Code: github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view. X: @bilawalsidhu. Newsletter: Map the World.
What he says on YouTube is self-disclosure. The GitHub stars, the layer list, the licenses stand on their own in the repo. The reading that this globe is a civilization-level map is ours. It sits in chapter 06, as a thesis, not a measurement.
YouTube, 9:59. The walkthrough of the repo. MIT, Cesium, Google 3D Tiles, voice, layers. YouTube.
YouTube, 11:07, about 1.9 million views. Operation Epic Fury from public signals, minute by minute on the globe. Essay: The Intelligence Monopoly Is Over, 4 March 2026.
Spatial intelligence. World models. Visual effects. Creator w/ 2.1M+ audience. Tech Curator @ TED. A16z Scout. Ex-Google PM (AR/VR & 3D Maps).
Profile on XAlso: TED 2023 · TED on YouTube · Vibe Coded Palantir, February 2026 · bilawal.ai.
His paradise is a globe you can fork.
Not the view from above as power. The view from above as a commons. Sidhu helped build the photoreal Earth at Google that billionaires and states already had. God's Eye View takes the same sphere and lets you lay aircraft, ships, satellites, fires, traffic, radio and public cameras on it. Then the sentence that carries the heaven, in the README, not as marketing: every layer is a pattern you can point at your own data sources.
That is better than Palantir for everyone, because it is not a product behind an NDA. It is customizable. You bring the layers your town, your firm, your war, your climate needs. The globe stays the base. The data is yours.
CGI at eleven, Deloitte at twenty, the planet as a product at thirty.
Bilawal Sidhu, Austin. High school at Oregon Episcopal School, Portland. Bachelor, University of Southern California. yespress.io and The Org carry those stations. Year of birth is in none of the primary sources we have, so it is absent here.
The spark he tells himself: a Discovery Kids episode on the VFX of Independence Day, a new PC, 3ds Max. Then Deloitte Digital, analyst and consultant, 2014 to 2016. Google from 2017, six years, Senior Product Manager. Immersive View, ARCore Geospatial API, YouTube VR Capture. Exit late March 2023. TED talk August 2023. From December 2023, Technology Curator and host. a16z scout from February 2024. Creator with figures between 1.6 and 2.1 million audience, depending on which bio you catch. Newsletter Map the World.
He did not invent the sphere. He learned how to fill it.
Immersive View: Street View, aerial and 3D mesh as one look you spin on a phone. Geospatial API: the phone knows not only where, but which way it faces, sub-meter, in more than 100 countries, Sidhu at Google I/O. YouTube VR Capture: camera systems, not only a player. Those are the years without which the weekend globe is a skin with no Earth. The 3D tiles God's Eye View runs on are Google's planet. He helped build them, and he now rents them back with an API key.
After Google: TED mainstage 2023, six minutes of imagination and AI. Then the other side of the stage, curator, co-host with Chris Anderson, TED AI Show, conversations with Helen Toner, Eric Schmidt. a16z scout, angel in Pika, Hedra, Convai, Backbone. Documentary The Untold Story of Google Earth, July 2025: from an $800-a-year spy tool in 2003 to a public mirror. halfpixel.ai is what he flags for the expensive part: not the present on the sphere, the past.
It looks like a forbidden console. That is the joke, and that is the risk.
FLIR, night vision, military HUD, detection boxes over everything. Sidhu says the aesthetics are meant to feel like a spy thriller. The data is public. The gesture is military. Projecting CCTV from Austin, Caltrans and London into the 3D city is not a private Stasi net. It makes more visible what the cities already stream. The difference is fusion: camera, traffic, aircraft, fire, one click.
That is not Palantir. Sidhu quotes the co-founder: he is missing real proprietary data fusion. Fair, he writes. Reports name Joe Lonsdale on TBPN: low-end SaaS should worry, a billion in infrastructure should not. OpenSky, the flight layer, is non-commercial. Google tiles are metered. TeleGeography cables are NonCommercial. The repo says all of that out loud. Anyone selling the globe as a weapon is not reading the README.
The Iran pieces are the other shadow. A man on a couch reconstructs strikes, satellite passes, airspace shutdowns. That is journalism with a better map, and it is war entertainment in 4D. Sidhu draws a line in the repo: no named-person search, no faces, no individuals as a query. "People are not a query type here." The line exists because the temptation sits in the product.
WorldView in a weekend. Iran in 4D. Then the code, because people asked.
Fig. Schema, not a screenshot. The sphere is Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. The rings are layers you toggle or replace.
In February 2026 the thing is called WorldView. Sidhu: three days, agents in parallel, Gemini and Claude. Live satellites, military ADS-B, CCTV on 3D geometry, seismic, traffic, CRT/NVG/FLIR. "Google Earth and Palantir had a baby." A week later the Iran strikes. WhatsApp to the agent: record everything before caches die. KH-11, TOPAZ, BARS-M, Gaofen, Maxar, Airbus, Capella, ICEYE over the same zones, before and after. Sidhu: The intelligence monopoly is over.
August 2026 the name God's Eye View, MIT, vanilla JS, Cesium, Vite. Thirteen live layers, ten with no key. Cockpit inside a tracked aircraft. Voice: take me to LAX, outline Texas, how many flights over Texas. 28 tools. Share links serialize camera, style, layers, one target. Firmatic cloned the repo two days after release: 2,601 tests green, 7,427 aircraft over OpenSky anon in one snapshot.
README: the architecture does not end at the bundled feeds. Every layer is a pattern. Issue or PR. City pack, sensor, style, voice tool. That is the Palantir difference that counts: you own the client.
Not a dot on a country outline. Flight paths, satellite passes, GPS interference, ships, cameras. Google News RSS and GDELT in the cockpit, with license caveats. The Iran film is the proof that public signals can carry a broadcast if the map holds them.
Sidhu: build in this space a week and you learn that now is the cheap part. Scrubbing what changed, at real resolution, gets expensive. That is halfpixel.ai. The open-source sphere is the live layer. History stays another product.
Google Maps tiles required, 1,000 sessions a month free on the cited US price list, then metered. Voice is OpenAI, $5 session cap in the app. AIS, FIRMS, TomTom optional. Ten layers: zero dollars, no account.
Maps like this belonged to services and armies. Now the base is public, and anyone can build their own globe.
This is our thesis, bound to Sidhu's work, not titled by him. In 2003 EarthViewer costs about $800 a year, Sidhu tells that in his Google Earth documentary, a spy look at a war. In 2005 Google gifts the mirror. Militaries and intelligence services have since got faster, denser, more current versions: their own constellations, SAR, tasking in hours. Everyday people got the beautiful planet, rarely the fusion. Tab after tab, Flightradar, MarineTraffic, USGS, a newscast with a red dot.
God's Eye View is the step after that, still rough, still with someone else's planet under the mesh, still with licenses that ban commerce. Even so: a photoreal globe in the browser, live layers, voice, an MIT client, your own sources plugged in. That was unreachable for anyone without a situation room. Now the base is here. Newsrooms, cities, researchers, firms, hobby OSINT can lay their world on it.
If that holds, the change is not only software. It is who is allowed to own a picture of the situation. A civilization in which anyone can run a globe sees wars, fires, supply chains and jams without a broadcaster's permission. It also sees more than it can carry. That is why the line against person queries. That is why the warning not to navigate. The next work is not the skin. It is which sources you plug in, and who you owe the fork to.
Three required questions, bound to scenes.
Clone the repo. Plug in your source. Build your globe.
What remains of Bilawal Sidhu when the views drop: a public base for maps that used to look like command. Not Palantir. A client you can hang OpenSky or your own net on. The thesis above is the invitation. The hell in the middle is the brake. Both belong in the same fork.
Method: Who the Heaven. German sister: Wer zum Himmel ist Bilawal Sidhu. Code: gods-eye-view.
| Claim | Basket | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Six years at Google, 2017 to March 2023, Immersive View, Geospatial API, YouTube VR | Fact | LinkedIn bio, TED speaker page, bilawal.ai. "Co-founded Immersive View" at yespress: we leave co-founder as self-attribution. |
| TED talk August 2023, curator from December 2023, a16z scout from February 2024 | Fact | ted.com, LinkedIn dates via Knowndex/Stackforce. |
| WorldView in three days, February 2026 | Self-disclosure | YouTube rXvU7bPJ8n4, Substack 4 March 2026. No independent commit log of those three days. |
| Palantir co-founder: missing proprietary fusion | Second-hand quote | Sidhu in video and Substack, unnamed. AGIHunt/Tencent: Joe Lonsdale, TBPN. TBPN original not checked by us. |
| Iran reconstruction from OSINT, March 2026 | Self-disclosure plus video | spatialintelligence.ai, YouTube 0p8o7AeHDzg. Satellite list is Sidhu's assignment, not operator confirmation. |
| Open source 24/25 August 2026, MIT | Fact | GitHub LICENSE, Sidhu Substack 25 August, Firmatic 26 August (24 August as put date). |
| 12,600 stars, 2,500 forks | Snapshot | GitHub UI, 30 August 2026. The number moves. |
| "People are not a query type here." | Quote | README, Responsible & Open. |
| Plugging in your own sources is the point | Fact in the repo, thesis in the valuation | README Keys/Costs: every layer is a pattern you can point at your own data sources. |
| This globe is a civilization-level map | Reading / hypothesis | Ours. Supported by the Keyhole/Google Earth documentary and the GEV repo, not measured. |
| EarthViewer $800/year, 2003 | Sidhu's documentary | YouTube lhMlFl_NR-g, Sci-fi Spy Tech chapter. No second source laid in this piece. |
- GitHub, gods-eye-viewMIT client, layers, licenses, README, 12.6k stars.https://github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view
- DATA_SOURCES.mdOpenSky, Google tiles, AIS, FIRMS, TeleGeography NonCommercial.https://github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view/blob/main/DATA_SOURCES.md
- I Open Sourced God's Eye ViewSubstack, 25 August 2026.https://www.spatialintelligence.ai/p/i-open-sourced-gods-eye-view
- The Intelligence Monopoly Is OverIran, 4 March 2026.https://www.spatialintelligence.ai/p/the-intelligence-monopoly-is-over
- YouTube, Vibe Coded PalantirrXvU7bPJ8n4, February 2026, co-founder reply.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXvU7bPJ8n4
- TED Speaker / TalkAugust 2023. Cover photo: TED speaker portrait.https://www.ted.com/speakers/bilawal_sidhu
- Firmatic, 26 August 2026Independent clone test, tests, OpenSky count.https://firmatic.nl/en/blog/gods-eye-view-open-source/
- Google Earth documentarySidhu, 7 July 2025, Keyhole/$800.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhMlFl_NR-g
Research as of 30 August 2026. McGrinsey writing skill, Who the Heaven method. Portrait: TED speaker photo, edited, scanlines.
