Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles
The most beautiful thing on this list: whole cities as real meshes. The catch is that you rent it, not own it. No caching, no offline, the logo always on screen.
PAID · Proprietary · ~1K free sessions/mo, then pay
Purpose
We can already see the whole Earth. What we lack is the parts list. This catalog is my attempt to write one: where the buildings, the ground, the weather, and the traffic come from, who owns them, and what it takes to put them on a globe of your own.
Function
This catalog is a buyer's guide for a planet. Read it to learn which data is worth fetching, where it lives, and what strings come attached.
An item is listed if it is useful for modeling the planet, relevant to independent builders, high in quality, and either open or honestly priced. Restrictions are printed, not buried.
Each issue adds a layer. When the live globe arrives, every entry becomes a switch: click it and that layer lights up on the Earth.
OPEN free to use, credit givenRESTRICTED free with stringsPAID metered or licensed
Buildings
Whole cities, as meshes or as honest gray blocks.Overture Buildings
The big merged pile: OSM, Microsoft, Google Open Buildings and others, about 2.5B footprints in GeoParquet. Free and well documented, but you do the tiling yourself.
OPEN · ODbL / CDLA mixed · free
Cesium OSM Buildings
Every building in OpenStreetMap, extruded worldwide. The data is open; the hosting's free plan covers only non-commercial use.
RESTRICTED · ODbL via ion · $149/mo commercial
Microsoft Global ML Footprints
Machine-traced roofs for places the mappers haven't reached yet. A good gap-filler; heights are sparse.
OPEN · ODbL · free
Terrain
The shape of the ground, from 30 m to 1 m.Copernicus DEM GLO-30
The best free global 30 m surface, sitting on AWS. Commercial use allowed. Convert it to quantized-mesh yourself.
OPEN · Open · free
SRTM
The old reliable. Public domain, but it stops at 60°N and has voids.
OPEN · Public domain · free
USGS 3DEP
1 m lidar for the US. Gorgeous, but it's a project, not a plug-in.
OPEN · Public domain · free
Cesium World Terrain
Plug-and-play, high quality. Commercial use means paying.
PAID · Proprietary · ion plans
Imagery
The planet's diary, written from orbit.Sentinel-2
A new 10 m picture of the planet every few days, free for anyone. Clouds are your enemy.
OPEN · Open · free
Landsat
Fifty years of the Earth's diary at 30 m. The best tool for time-lapse storytelling.
OPEN · Public domain · free
NASA Worldview
Daily global snapshots, browsable by date. Pick any day and see the sky that day.
OPEN · Public domain · free
Esri World Imagery
Looks great and asks no key. It's still Esri's house, with terms that limit commercial and bulk use.
RESTRICTED · Proprietary · free-ish for dev
Street-level
The view from the sidewalk.Mapillary
Billions of crowd photos under CC BY-SA with a free API. Coverage is patchy but real.
OPEN · Open · free
Google Street View
The gold standard, inside Google's rules: no storing frames, per-load pricing.
PAID · Proprietary · ~$14 / 1K dynamic loads
Panoramax
Smaller, community-run. The one to watch in Europe.
OPEN · Open · free
Apple Look Around
Lovely imagery, locked inside MapKit. Can't go on your own globe.
RESTRICTED · Proprietary · not portable
Weather
Wind, rain, and where the sun stood.NOAA GFS & HRRR
The raw firehose of American forecasting, public domain on AWS. GRIB files mean plumbing.
OPEN · Public domain · free
ECMWF Open Data
The world's best model, now open.
OPEN · CC BY 4.0 · free
Open-Meteo
The friendly front door to all of the above, in clean JSON, historical records included.
RESTRICTED · CC BY 4.0 · free non-commercial / paid
Sun position
Solar angle for any place and moment. Pure math, no API at all.
OPEN · Algorithm · free
Traffic
Everything that moves: cars, trains, planes, ships.GTFS / GTFS-RT
Every bus and train that agencies publish. One license per agency.
OPEN · Open · free
TomTom / HERE Traffic
Real congestion, metered and caching-limited. The one layer with no good open source.
PAID · Proprietary · usage billing
adsb.lol / OpenSky
Live planes. adsb.lol is commercial-friendly; OpenSky is non-commercial only.
RESTRICTED · ODbL / non-commercial
AISStream / Spire
Ships. AISStream is free but beta with ocean gaps; Spire is paid satellite AIS.
RESTRICTED · Beta free / proprietary
Context of the moment
What the world was saying the day you were there.Wayback Machine
What any web page looked like on a given day. The internet's own time machine.
OPEN · Free · fair use
Wikipedia “On this day”
Events, births, and deaths for any date, in a tidy feed.
OPEN · CC BY-SA · free
GDELT
Global news events, geocoded, every 15 minutes since 2015.
OPEN · Open · free
Gas prices & CPI
What a gallon and a dollar were worth, from public statistics series.
OPEN · Public domain · free
Your own Earth
You are a small model inside the big one. Bring your logbook.Location history
Exported from the phone that recorded it: visits, trips, and raw points as JSON.
OPEN · Your data · on your device
Photos & EXIF
Originals from Takeout or privacy.apple.com; exiftool pulls GPS, time, and which way you faced.
OPEN · Your data · strip GPS before sharing
Strava · Garmin · Apple Health
Account exports give you GPX routes and workout tracks.
OPEN · Your data · free export
Check-ins & rides
Swarm, Uber and friends offer data downloads; GDPR/CCPA requests cover the rest.
OPEN · Your data · request it