God's Eye View meets Claude: we asked its MCP server 11 questions

God's Eye View, the open-source 3D globe with live public data, can now be used from inside an AI assistant. Version 0.2, released on 2 October 2026, adds an MCP server: you ask Claude, Codex or ChatGPT about earthquakes, rockets or hurricanes, and the assistant answers from the app's data. In some apps it is meant to show the live globe as well. We installed a clean copy, asked it eleven questions, and checked the answers against the original sources. The data matched. The places it looked did not always, and in our Claude Desktop test the globe itself did not load in the conversation.

This is the fifth article in our series on God's Eye View. The earlier ones covered what it does and what it costs, what you may share in screenshots and video and what is live, delayed and simulated.

What is new in version 0.2

The project's changelog calls version 0.2 "God's Eye View through Your Agent". The idea is that you no longer have to open the globe and click through layers yourself. You ask an assistant, and the assistant asks God's Eye View.

That works through MCP, the Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI assistants to outside tools. The project ships a small MCP server that runs next to the app on your own computer. According to its setup guide, Claude Desktop, Codex and the ChatGPT desktop app can then show the live globe inside the conversation. Claude Code and the Codex command-line tool answer with data and a link. In this Claude Code session we saw exactly that: data and a link, no globe.

The tools cover most of what the app shows: earthquakes, active fires, rocket launches, aircraft and ships in an area, satellites overhead and the next pass of a satellite, public cameras, submarine cables, datacenters, weather maps, tropical cyclones, terrain height and a combined situation brief. One more tool, show_in_gods_eye_view, puts a chosen view on the globe.

Version 0.2.1 followed on the same day with security fixes. According to the changelog, the app now refuses requests from other websites to its endpoints that can cost money, and it limits the paid OpenAI and Google endpoints to 30 and 120 requests a minute by default. We did not test those protections.

Bilawal Sidhu, who started the project, published a video on 29 September with 4D reconstructions of moving animals, events and places. Those are his own experiments. We did not find them in the changelog or the README of the public release we tested.

How we set it up

We left our earlier test installation alone and made a clean copy of version 0.2.1 in its own folder, without any API keys. The steps follow the project's MCP setup guide:

• Install the dependencies. npm ci took 8.4 seconds on our laptop, with a warm package cache.
• Build the small panel that shows the globe inside a conversation: npm run build:panel, 5.1 seconds.
• Start the app with npm run dev. Watch the port: the setup guide uses 5173 in all its examples, but the app starts on 4173 by default, and the MCP server also reads from 4173 when you give it no address. The port in the configuration below must match the one the app runs on. We started the app on 5173 to follow the guide.
• Tell the assistant where the server is. For Claude Desktop that is one block in its configuration file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gods-eye-view": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["C:\\path\\to\\gods-eye-view\\server\\mcp\\stdio.js", "--api-base", "http://localhost:5173"]
    }
  }
}

The guide asks for absolute paths, because the assistant does not load your terminal settings. On our machine Node.js is not installed system-wide, so we used the full path to node.exe instead of "node". We made a backup of the configuration file first.

After a full restart of Claude Desktop the tools appeared. The first time Claude wanted to use one, it asked: "Claude wants to use Tropical cyclones from gods-eye-view", with Deny, Always allow and Allow once. We chose Allow once.

One small snag: the project's setup check reported "npm was not found". That was our own machine, where npm was not on the system path; after we fixed that, the check reported "Ready". It did not stop anything.

What the tools returned, checked against the source

Before trying Claude Desktop, we wrote a small test client that speaks the same protocol as the assistants. It introduced itself, asked for the list of tools and then asked eleven questions. The server answered as "gods-eye-view 0.2.1" and listed 30 tools.

Where we could check, the data matched exactly. Where a key was missing, the server said so in plain words instead of returning an empty list. Response times ranged from 24 milliseconds for the datacenter list to 3.8 seconds for the launch list.

We deliberately left out every question that uses the general flight feed from the OpenSky Network, for the licence reasons we describe in our third article. The military aircraft question uses adsb.lol instead.

Where it goes wrong: the area behind the answer

Two answers were correct in themselves, but looked at a different place than a reader would expect.

"Submarine cables in the Netherlands": 178 cables. The list included 2Africa and the Africa Coast to Europe cable. When we checked how the app resolved the place name, the answer was clear: "Netherlands" became the whole Kingdom of the Netherlands, including its Caribbean islands. The area ran from 53.7° north down to 11.8° north and from 7.2° east to 70.3° west, which covers a large part of the Atlantic. The count is right for that box. It is not what most people mean by the Netherlands.

The cyclone view pointed at Africa. Every answer comes with a suggested view for the globe. For the cyclones, that view looked straight down at 20° north and 0° east, over West Africa, while both hurricanes were in the Pacific. You can see the result in the image above: the panel lists Rachel and Nolo, the camera shows Africa. If an assistant passes that view on unchanged, you look at the wrong side of the planet.

Neither is a data error. Both are reminders that an AI tool's answer depends on how it interpreted your question. Ask for an area as specific as you can, or look at the area the tool reports back. The server's own instructions to assistants say something similar: results are capped, so check the total before concluding there is nothing more.

The globe in the conversation

This is the headline feature of version 0.2, and in our test it did not work. We asked Claude Desktop: "Show the active tropical cyclones in God's Eye View." Claude asked permission for the cyclone tool, then called show_in_gods_eye_view. Where the globe should have appeared, the panel said: "God's Eye View could not load here: Only the God's Eye View panel may make this request."

The rest of the answer was useful. Claude wrote a short summary with a table of both hurricanes, with position, wind, pressure and movement, and noted that this source covers only the Atlantic and the eastern and central North Pacific. All values matched NOAA's advisory of 15:00 UTC. The panel also offered a button, "Open in God's Eye View". It opened the view in the app, framed on both hurricanes, with a label Claude had added to each. That is the image at the top of this article. The labels were in Dutch, "Orkaan Nolo" and "Orkaan Rachel", although the question was in English. Claude chose that itself.

Why did the globe not load? We looked in the code. The error comes from a check in the server: each copy of the MCP server makes its own secret key when it starts, and the globe panel must send that key with its requests. When we looked afterwards, Claude Desktop had started two copies of the server, in the same second. If the panel came from one copy and its requests reached the other, the keys would not match and this exact message would appear. That is our best explanation, not a proven one. It may also depend on the mode we used, Cowork, or on our Windows setup.

With an area added to the request, the same server did frame hurricane Rachel closely in the app: the forecast track from 12 to 72 hours and the shaded cone that shows where the centre may go. That is the picture in this section. The cone and the track are NOAA's forecast as the app received it, not a calculation by the app.

How we checked

We reviewed the project's CHANGELOG, README, MCP setup guide and tools documentation at version 0.2.1 (commit aa16b7c). Settings and tools can change with any update.

We installed that version on 4 October 2026 in a separate folder on the Windows laptop described in our first article, without configured API keys. Our test client spoke the MCP protocol to the server over its standard input and output and asked the eleven questions in the table. We compared the earthquake with the USGS feed and the cyclones with NOAA's list of current storms, both fetched on the same evening. We checked how the app resolved "Netherlands" by asking its own place search.

The Claude Desktop test was done by the owner of this site, Marvin Smit, in Claude Desktop with Opus 5.5, in its Cowork mode. The screenshots from Claude Desktop are his and have only been resized. Afterwards we counted the MCP server processes Claude Desktop had started. The other screenshots were captured by us from the links the tools returned and have only been resized. The charts and diagrams were made by us from our own test file; none of the images is AI-generated.

Our review covers the MCP server with Claude Desktop and our own client. It does not cover ChatGPT, Codex, the HTTP version of the server, features that need a key, or the security fixes in version 0.2.1. This is an editorial review of the sources we consulted and the tests we ran.