OCULUS SANCTI
User Guide
What's on this page
Oculus Sancti has a lot packed into one 3D globe. This guide walks through every feature — jump to any section below, or just read top to bottom your first time.
1. Getting started
Oculus Sancti is a live-data exploration globe — a photorealistic 3D map of Earth with dozens of optional layers of real, public data on top: aircraft, ships, weather, natural disasters, live traffic cameras, satellites, and more. Every account is free.
The first time you sign in, you'll be asked what brings you here today (personal, business research, journalism, event planning, or other). This is a one-click "state your purpose" step — pick the closest match and optionally add a short detail. It's remembered for next time, so it's a single click on future visits, not a form every login. See Privacy, safety & the activity check below for why this exists.
Once you're in, you land on the full 3D globe. Everything described below is reachable from panels docked around the edges of the screen — nothing is hidden behind a menu you have to hunt for.
3. Visual presets & map sources
Open Visual Presets (bottom command dock) to change how the globe is rendered:
- Style filters — Normal, CRT (retro monitor look), NVG (night-vision green), FLIR (thermal), Anime, Noir, and Snow. Purely visual; the underlying data is identical in every style. Number keys 1–7 switch between them instantly.
- Map source — choose the imagery the globe is built from: photorealistic 3D tiles, a flat 2D basemap (OpenStreetMap or Bing), NASA satellite imagery, or Mapbox — whichever chips show as available. A chip marked KEY needs your own free API key connected first (see Your account).
4. Data layers
The Data Layers panel (left side) is where you turn on live overlays. Every layer is independent — turn on as many or as few as you want. Most work with no setup; a few are marked as needing your own free key in Settings for a higher rate limit or extra detail, but always have a working free fallback.
Air & space
- Aircraft — live commercial flight positions worldwide, plus a separate military-flight layer.
- Satellites — real-time orbital positions computed from public tracking data.
- Rocket launches — recent and upcoming launches with payload and stage details when available.
- Near-Earth object watch (top toolbar) — a 7-day list of asteroid close approaches from NASA.
Sea
- Vessels (AIS) — live ship positions from public AIS broadcast data.
- Fishing activity — an apparent fishing-effort heatmap near your camera (needs your own free Global Fishing Watch key).
Natural events & weather
- Earthquakes, volcanoes, and natural events (storms, floods, ice, wildfires elsewhere covered separately) — recent activity from USGS/NOAA/NASA.
- Disaster alerts — active, risk-scored alerts (earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, floods, volcanoes) from the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System.
- Weather alerts — active National Weather Service alert areas (U.S.).
- Live radar — a live precipitation radar overlay.
- Airport weather — current conditions (METAR) for airports in view.
- Ocean buoys — live marine conditions from NOAA data buoys.
- Day/night terminator — the real-time line between day and night on Earth.
Environment & safety
- Air quality — an AQI readout at wherever your camera is looking, worldwide.
- Air quality sensors — individual citizen-run air-quality sensor readings (PurpleAir).
- Crime data — a HUD readout of jurisdiction-level crime statistics (U.S.), plus a national crime-rate-by-state color map. This is aggregate government statistics, not individual incident locations.
Ground & infrastructure
- 3D Buildings (on by default) — simple 3D building volumes from OpenStreetMap footprints, so towns outside Google's photorealistic coverage aren't flat. They appear automatically once you're below city altitude, around wherever the camera is looking, and never draw over buildings Google already models in 3D. Heights are real where OpenStreetMap has them and estimated from the footprint where it doesn't.
- Traffic — live road congestion coloring (with your own free/paid TomTom key) or a built-in simulation without one.
- CCTV cameras — see section 5 below.
- EV charging stations, bikeshare availability, and military installations context (from public mapped data, not intelligence) — point layers you can click for detail.
Points of interest
- Nearby (Wikipedia) — clickable pins for nearby Wikipedia articles; click one to read a summary without leaving the app.
- Category landmarks — points of interest by category, sourced from open map data.
- Radio — a directory of nearby internet-radio stations you can tune in and listen to live.
5. Live traffic cameras (CCTV)
The CCTV panel shows real, publicly operated traffic camera feeds — the same feeds a city's own transportation department publishes. Every camera here is one its operator deliberately made public; there's no face recognition, license-plate reading, or named-person search anywhere in this app.
- Enable / Nearest — turn the layer on and jump to the camera nearest your current view.
- Prev / Next or the camera dropdown — step through cameras in the current area.
- Focus — snaps the 3D camera to look through the selected feed's real-world position and angle.
- Coverage — shows every camera's approximate field of view as a shape on the map.
- Auto Hop — automatically advances to the next camera on a timer, useful for a passive "patrol" view.
- Projection — drapes the live video frame onto the 3D terrain/buildings it's actually pointed at, instead of showing it as a flat picture-in-picture.
- Calibration — fine-tune a camera's heading, pitch, field of view, and position if the projection looks slightly off; ADJUST lets you drag it into alignment directly in the 3D view.
6. Aircraft cockpit view
Click any live aircraft to enter a first-person cockpit view riding along with it, built from its real live position, heading, speed, and altitude — not a simulation.
- Instruments — speed, altitude, heading, and a compass tape update live from the aircraft's real telemetry.
- Vision styles — cycle through optical/thermal/night-vision rendering with the previous/next arrows at the top.
- Contact panel — nearby aircraft, vessels, and mapped ground sites within range, for situational context (not a claim of complete coverage).
- Live signals / News / Local — a rotating briefing card: nearby live signal pings, real regional news headlines matched to your current location, and local live weather conditions.
- Radio — the same internet-radio directory as the main Radio layer, playable from inside the cockpit.
- Display options — toggle the HUD, detection overlay, and 3D aircraft models on or off from inside the cockpit.
Press ESC or C to exit back to the normal globe view.
7. Route planner
Open the route icon in the top toolbar to plan a walking, biking, or driving route between two or more points.
- Add waypoints, then Generate Route for real turn-by-turn directions and an elevation profile.
- Fly Route animates the camera along your planned path.
- Points of interest along the route are listed automatically.
- Export Event Scout Report (PDF) — pick a date and generate a printable PDF covering the route, elevation, nearby points of interest, and expected weather for that date. Useful for planning a race, tour, or outdoor event.
8. Disaster preparedness brief
Enter any location, your household size, and whether you have pets, then generate a Disaster Preparedness Brief (PDF) — a personalized readiness report covering the real hazards relevant to that specific place (weather alerts, flood zones, nearby fire activity, and more) with practical, household-sized guidance rather than generic advice.
9. Scene director
For anyone recording video or building a guided tour of the globe, the Scene panel lets you script a sequence of camera shots and play them back automatically:
- Capture Shot — saves your current camera position/angle/style as a step.
- Start / Stop / Next — plays your saved sequence of shots, or steps through manually.
- Export / Import presets — save a sequence as a file to reuse or share, or load one back in.
- Run Log — download a record of a completed playback run.
10. Solar system mode
Zoom all the way out and Oculus Sancti opens up into the full solar system — fly to any planet or major moon, see it rendered from real texture data, and (where available) drop back down to a surface view or open its Wikipedia article. Click "EARTH" in the panel to return to the globe.
11. Voice control
The microphone control (bottom-right) lets you drive the app hands-free: switch visual styles, toggle data layers, control scene playback, and draw annotations directly onto the globe by voice. It shows a live running cost estimate while active — this feature uses a paid AI voice API behind the scenes, and a "MINI" mode is available for a cheaper/lighter-weight tier. Voice control is entirely optional; every feature it can trigger is also available through the regular panels described above.
You can also just ask it things — "when was the Golden Gate Bridge built," "was the Sahara always a desert" — and it will answer briefly from its own knowledge, the same as the rest of the conversation. It's kept factual and educational: it won't offer medical, legal, financial, or personal-safety advice, or share information about a specific private individual.
12. Display & visual effects
The Display panel (top right) holds rendering options that don't change what data is shown, only how it looks:
- HUD — an intelligence-style heads-up overlay, with Tactical/Operator/Minimal layout options.
- Detection — highlights and labels moving contacts on screen, with density, fade-distance, and label-allocation controls.
- 3D aircraft — full 3D aircraft models up close (Proximity) or everywhere (All) instead of flat icons.
- Scope — the circular "keyhole" viewport mask, with an edge-softness (Feather) slider.
- Celestial — a ring showing the sun/moon position relative to your view.
- Bloom and Sharpen — glow and edge-sharpening image effects, adjustable or off.
13. Your account
- Account → Settings — connect your own free API key for any optional data source (Google Maps, Mapbox, TomTom traffic, and others). Entirely opt-in; everything works without connecting anything. A key you connect is tied to your account, not your device — sign in anywhere and it's already there.
- Account → My Activity — a read-only log of your own sign-ins and searched locations. Only you (and, in aggregate, the app operator for safety review — see below) can see it.
- Report a Bug — found something broken? This sends a short message plus your current view context straight to the operator.
- Admin — visible only to the app operator's own account; manages users and bug reports.
14. Privacy, safety & the activity check
This app shows live camera feeds and location data, so it's worth being direct about what is and isn't watched, and why.
What this app is not
There is no face recognition, no license-plate reading, and no way to search for or track a specific named person. Every camera and sensor shown is one its owner deliberately made public. Using this app to monitor, track, or gather information about a specific individual is against the usage rules and grounds for losing access.
What is logged, and why
Your sign-ins and the locations you search are logged to your account internally — you can see this exact log yourself anytime in My Activity. It is never published and never shared outside the app operator.
The automated activity check — plainly explained
To catch the one real misuse case a tool like this creates — someone using location search to fixate on a single person's address — a simple, rule-based check runs over that same activity log. It is not an AI model, and it does not read, understand, or judge anything about you as a person. It only compares two things: how narrowly repeated your searches are around one place, and whether that matches the general purpose you stated when you signed in (for example, "business research" plausibly explains broad, varied searching; it doesn't explain dozens of searches that all land on one home address). It looks at:
- Repeat focus — most searches landing on one specific place, across multiple separate visits, rather than broad or varied browsing.
- Escalation — that focus increasing over time, rather than a flat, one-time count.
- Timing pattern — repeat searches clustering around the same time of day, a pattern associated with tracking someone's routine.
This never produces a numeric "risk score," a ban, or any automatic consequence. If a pattern matches, a plain, visible message appears for that account — something like "we noticed repeated searches on one location, can you tell us what's going on?" — and your typed reply goes directly and only to a human (the app operator), never to an automated verdict. The operator reads the pattern and your answer together and decides — a flag is a reason to ask a question, never a conclusion on its own.
Other things worth knowing
- This app uses no ad trackers or third-party analytics of any kind.
- Your browser stores your sign-in session and your last-picked "purpose" locally (localStorage), so you don't have to re-enter them constantly — this stays on your device and is never a tracking mechanism.
- Sign-in and sign-up are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, a bot-verification check — Cloudflare's own privacy terms cover that specific interaction.
- An account can be revoked at any time for violating the usage rules. Revoking access preserves the account's activity history rather than deleting it.
- If you connect your own API key for an optional data source, using it makes you responsible for that provider's own terms.
The full, formal versions of this live on their own pages: Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
↑ Back to topBuilt on the shoulders of an open-source project
Oculus Sancti is built with inspiration from God's Eye View by Bilawal Sidhu, released under the MIT License. Full credits, license text, and the complete third-party data attribution list live on the Credits page.