Stowaway lets you hitch a ride on any plane or satellite overhead
Stowaway – take the window seat on any plane or satellite overhead
Stowaway (stowaway.live) turns your web browser into a window seat on any aircraft or satellite currently passing over your location. The site renders the real sky, terrain, and live traffic in real time using WebGL 2, so you can click on a plane and follow its journey from a passenger's perspective. Built by jheising and open-sourced on GitHub, it's a mesmerizing way to watch the world from above.
Pick any aircraft or satellite passing over your house right now, and go sit in its window seat.
- jheising
Hi all! I'm the creator of Stowaway.live and I really appreciate you
posting it here.
All this attention has maxed out my Google 3D Tiles quota, so the ground
textures in ride-along mode are being throttled. Everything else works —
sky, aircraft and satellite tracking, sound — it's just the terrain that
may come in flat or missing. I'm working on a caching layer and a proper
fallback rather than just buying my way out of it, and I'd take
suggestions if anyone's solved this before.
Thanks for checking it out!
- cpeterso
I wish I could see Google Maps labels like this during a real flight!
- vintagedave
I love this: the sound effects oddly are what really make it. It was quite something clicking a flight, turning round to see behind it, and recognising my location.
What surprised me is how satellites far away (in the night zone, it's daylight for hours yet) could still 'see' me, or rather, I could see them not even that close to the horizon. I would love to see how far away one of the objects is when clicking or hovering over it.