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Stowaway – Take the window seat on any plane or satellite overhead
- stevage 2mo agoPretty amazing. One of those great sites that is just "wow, I would never have thought of trying to build that". And I'm glad you did.
- jaggs 2mo agoThis is so very cool.
- natch 2mo agoNice work! I got lost in a clouds only view after setting my location but I’m sure I’ll figure it out, the first couple flights were over an unfamiliar area but worked fine.
- vintagedave 2mo agoI 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.
- raver1975 2mo agoI love it. I use it to try to trick people into believing it's a live view, and that I work for the government.
- Aboutplants 2mo agoWow, this is really great!
- jheising 2mo agoHi 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!
- gavinsyancey 2mo agoThere is good free data available. Consider using EASA Sentinel satellite tiles for the imagery, and JAXA's ALOS Global Digital Surface Model for elevation. And the USGS has higher-resolution lidar elevations in much of the US.
- jheising 2mo agoI will look into this, thanks! In the meantime I'm going to implement a fallback to 2D tiles which has much higher quota limits. Try to stop the bleeding first.
- gavinsyancey 2mo agoProbably your best bet -- EASA has worldwide cloudless imagery [1] (scroll down for a link to their tile server) as well as a worldwide high-resolution elevation model [2] [1] https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/news/2024-2-27-exploring-new-frontier-sentinel-cloudless-mosaics-copernicus-data-space-ecosystem https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/news/2024-2-27-exploring-new... [2] https://documentation.dataspace.copernicus.eu/APIs/SentinelHub/Data/DEM.html https://documentation.dataspace.copernicus.eu/APIs/SentinelH...
- codetiger 2mo agoI built a terrain height map completely from free data. https://codetiger.in/earth/ https://codetiger.in/earth/
- dotancohen 2mo agoThis is really nice. It's _almost_ useful for identifying features from where one stands, if it had another three levels of zoom and another three levels of voxel resolution.
- codetiger 2mo agoI tried adding more resolutions, but had to balance it against cost of hosting. Each resolution is at least 2x the size of the combined all prev zoom level data. Currently I’ve 9 zoom levels total size 15gb, adding 1 more level takes it to 32gb but looks beautiful. With the current open data, I can generate upto 14 levels
- jheising 2mo agoSince I'm here, the why: When I was a kid — back when travelling still felt new and exciting — I would see a plane crossing the early evening sky and try to put myself in it. Not to go anywhere in particular. I just wanted to know what the world looked like from up there, right then, to whoever was sitting by that window. The feeling was strongest at sunset. I'd be watching a good one from the ground and think about how much better it had to be from up there, above the haze, with the light coming in level. The same sunset from a perspective I couldn't reach. Travel has lost most of that. Airports, queues, delays: everything wrapped around flying has got steadily worse. But the flying itself hasn't changed. An hour into a clear evening flight, forehead against the glass, looking down at a world you almost never see from that angle, and it is still one of the quietly moving experiences I know. Stowaway is that part, without the rest of it.
- KuhlMensch 2mo agoI'm in Central Spain at 5:30am... I was pleasantly surprised to hear crickets. If not for the for the sound of fan and aircon - that is what I would be able to hear coming from my window. I checked from Brighton, UK, and there is perhaps the same crickets (and birdsong for this time). I found it quite compelling. Be cool if you scaled the volume to latitude and chirp-rate to temperature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear%27s_law)
- jheising 2mo agoI LOVE the idea of applying Dolbear's Law, that would be such a cool touch.
- BLKNSLVR 2mo ago> forehead against the glass, looking down at a world you almost never see from that angle I'm surprised by how few people seem to do this. I feel like I'm the only adult acting like a child when I do it. Look around and see most everyone else treating it like a night time bus ride through a tunnel. P.S. Great project name. Stowaway. Perfect.
- cpeterso 2mo agoI wish I could see Google Maps labels like this during a real flight!
- Retr0id 2mo agoSuper cool. I like how you can hop from plane to plane. However, once I hop to a satellite, it seems like I'm stuck there. It'd be nice if there were more options from that point.
- lofaszvanitt 2mo agoGreat idea.
- Arn_Thor 2mo agoThis is super cool. Made me happy to see what's up in the sky. Bookmarked for when I need a pick-me-up!
- alex-moon 2mo agoThis is great but it would be useful to have some indication of cardinal directions - it is not clear to me which way I am facing.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- dools 2mo agoMind genuinely blown
- tremarley 2mo agoTruly incredible. How long did it take to build this?
- smusamashah 2mo agoPlease add a way to put in my exact long+lat location. Currently it is a slider which is not exact and search bar does not show my exact location. I am hoping to see the airplanes out of my window and then see them in this app.
- thinkingemote 2mo agoNot working for me on firefox on linux. Console shows THREE.WebGLRenderer: Context Lost. index-DMul8aia.js:3819:24355 Object { error: undefined } Stowaway failed to start It also made firefox actually hard crash to desktop!
- eutropia 2mo agoanother firefox on linux user (cachyos), and it loaded up and worked flawlessly for me. anecdata!
- opello 2mo agoFor me it failed to load (with the same console.log messages as above) in a multi-account container tab, and crashed Firefox in a Private Browsing window.
- clsec 2mo agoWorked fine for me in a temporary container in FF on Ubuntu. I have uBO, Privacy Badger & Disconnect extensions enabled.
- jheising 2mo agoThanks for the report, we'll look into it!
- jwr 2mo agoNow could you please sell this to all airlines to replace those terrible, terrible in-flight maps that they show?
- brettermeier 2mo agoOh man, it took a while till i saw the button "Ride along"... but now i understand, nice project!
- RankingMember 2mo agoThis is fun! Some constructive feedback: 1. Maybe don't have the view limited by the position on the aircraft- autoswitching between sides would be smoother. 2. Maybe just have double-click on an aircraft initiate ride-along. It's a little clunky and took me a minute to figure out how to ride along as-is. 3. Some kind of overhead view so we could more easily pick out a plane we want to view from would be nice. As it is, I ended up firing up https://globe.airplanes.live/ https://globe.airplanes.live/ to find the plane I wanted to view from, then tabbed back to your app to paste the flight number in. 4. Add "reticulating splines" during loading as one of the messages (old Maxis SimCity reference just for fun :P )
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Projectiboga 2mo agoPersonally I prefer aisle seats. I am 6'2" and the slightly curved space on the window isn't as comfortable for me, same with some trains and busses. Yes the aisle has its own negatives but that's the devil I prefer.
- ted_dunning 2mo agoThe visualization for the aisle seat is much less interesting than for the window seat. Maybe that's why they built what they built.
- Projectiboga 2mo agoI wasn't positing "which is better?", I was just mentioning that some prefer the aisle in spite of the window view.
- acrophiliac 2mo agoThis is great. I've been riding along with the air attack plane on the Timber Fire near Big Sur, CA. It would be cool to see the fire perimeter overlay (like in app.watchduty.org).
- snapetom 2mo agoThis was so much fun, thank you. Question for you, and I guess also if you know why Airplanes.live doesn't do this - why not show the destination? I get that airplanes.live is primarily tracking and the source system, (ADS-B/MLAT?) won't show the destination airports, but would it be difficult, at least for you, to integrate a destination lookup?
- jheising 2mo agoSo there are some free sources I found for departure and arrival destinations, but they were wrong more than they were right, so unfortunately the only way to get reliable information is from a paid source. I may offer this at some point as a paid option down the road if popularity continues.
- snapetom 2mo agoAh, interesting. Makes sense. Seems like that would be publicly available FAA data.
- acrophiliac 2mo agoOops, I flew through a mountain. How did that happen? https://i.postimg.cc/Mp3sBrtG/stowaway-20260811-175512.png https://i.postimg.cc/Mp3sBrtG/stowaway-20260811-175512.png
- jheising 2mo agoVery interesting! Most likely bad or incorrect altitude or position data from an aircraft transponder.