Stowaway: a browser globe that puts you in the window seat of any plane or satellite overhead

Stowaway is a WebGL-based web app that renders a live view of the sky above your actual location, populated with the real aircraft and satellites currently passing over you. It pulls in your position, local weather, and the current lighting conditions to reconstruct the scene as it looks outside right now, then overlays the objects genuinely in transit above.

The interaction model is the hook: pick any plane or satellite and the camera locks onto it, or “stow away” to drop into its window seat and watch real terrain scroll by from onboard. Everything is drawn in real time in the browser, which is why the site depends on JavaScript and WebGL 2 and won’t render with scripting disabled.

As a technical artifact it’s a neat demonstration of what client-side graphics can do with live geospatial and orbital tracking data—turning public flight and satellite position feeds into an immediate, embodied visualization rather than a flat map of dots.