Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Near-realtime cloud maps for weather visualisation, 3D models and more
This is a service I've built to provide equirectangular cloud maps of the whole Earth, updated every 3 hours, for free. It's based on infrared and visible light data from EUMETSAT, processed to enhance the clouds and try to reduce the impact of surface temperatures on the final image. I built it because it's surprisingly hard to find these kinds of images in a format that's useful to developers and hobbyists. I was building a 3D ISS tracker and wanted to include live clouds but couldn't find anything good, so I got sidetracked, and here we are.
This service provides free equirectangular cloud maps of the entire Earth, updated every three hours using infrared and visible light data from EUMETSAT. The maps are processed to enhance cloud details and minimize… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Near-realtime cloud maps for weather visualisation, 3D models and more launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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This is a little hobby project that I hope you enjoy. You can see where the International Space Station is now, with live HD video from NASA, on a realistic 3D globe. The positions of the sun and moon are also accurate, though distances aren't to scale. The clouds are also near-realtime; I span that out into a separate project at https://clouds.matteason.co.uk, where the cloud images I create from EUMETSAT data are freely available. I've got more features almost ready to go, like the ability to turn off all UI, toggleable clouds and turning off the day/night cycle I'd love for…
2024 · iss.matteason.co.uk · its alternatives →
- 2
For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript. Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon [1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
2025 · sky.dlazaro.ca · its alternatives →
- 3
A "virtual satellite" to map Earth in unprecedented detail
2025 · deepmind.google · its alternatives →
- 4
I've been working on this project for about 4 years. It began as terrain only because world wide elevation data was publicly available. I then added buildings from OpenStreetMap (crowd sourced) and more recently from Overture Maps data. Some computer vision/machine learning advancements [1] in the past few years have made it possible to estimate tree canopy heights using satellite imagery alone making it possible to finally add trees to the map. The data isn't perfect, but it's within +/- 3 meters of so. Good enough to give a general idea for any location on Earth. Happy to answer…
2024 · shademap.app · its alternatives →
- 5MA
The concept for metiq.space came after playing Global Magnates with friends and realizing how fragmented live global data is. ships, aircraft, satellites, ports, weather, hazards, infrastructure, cyber, and public datasets all exist, but they usually live in separate tools and maps. The goal was to build one interactive 3D globe where live public data could be visualized by latitude, longitude, and altitude. Surface data stays on the globe, while aircraft, satellites, and other above surface things can be represented in actual 3D space instead of being flattened onto a map. The outcome is an…
Jun 2026 · metiq.space · its alternatives →
- 6
EarthGuessr▲192I built it as a way to practice programming. There are probably much better alternatives out there.
2025 · earthguessr.com · its alternatives →
- 7G3
I made a web app to generate 3D models of real places on earth from land cover and elevation data. Click anywhere on the map to get a polygon, and then click "generate". It should work at most scales, but if your watershed or region selection is too large, the result can be less exciting because it's so flat. As a warning, the 3D models can sometimes be too much for my phone. It's nicer on desktop. I'm still working better on mobile support. The land cover data I'm using gives a cool effect, but at some point I'd like to add in global imagery and clouds. The backend is a Python thread…
2025 · topography.jessekv.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Google released an API in May to get fetch 3D Tiles of anywhere on Earth. Using this in standard 3D engines like Blender is tricky because (1) the tiles are in a geographic coordinate system (2) you get a lot of little tiles at varying quality levels I wanted to simplify this so all you need to do is get an API key, select a map region and a zoom level, and get one combined glTF file that you can throw into any engine. Especially if you're just prototyping and want to see how this data looks in your engine before investing in figuring out all the nuances of the API & coordinate system. (Note…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9BA
2023 · briefsky.app · its alternatives →
- 10CB
2019 · cloudbrowser.website · its alternatives →
- 11IE
2017 · mjmdavis.com · its alternatives →
- 12MA
Hello HN! I’m excited to share this open-source community mashup showing the power and possibility of combining 3D Gaussian splat scans with traditional mesh-based 3D tiles maps in the browser. As you've probably seen on HN a bunch lately, Gaussian splats are a new method to allow custom 3D scans of scenes and objects [1] and Google Maps 3D Tiles API are the same 3D buildings and street views your familiar with in Google Earth or Google Maps, and recently they’ve been made available for inclusion in web apps. Combining splats + 3d map mixes highly detailed real-world custom micro-scans with…
2024 · maps-and-splats.glitch.me · its alternatives →
- 13
- 14
Hi all, This project release is a long time coming. It was a big uphill battle, and by far my largest endeavor so far. I built it for Sandstorm because I believe in Sandstorm's model, and I wanted to show that there's still life and potential in it. If you're inspired, joining our OpenCollective would be really helpful: https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity (keeping in mind that Sandstorm has now moved from its original leadership to a community project https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-11-03-from-io-to-org). You can also join our mailing list or…
2023 · sandstorm.org · its alternatives →
- 15
Virtual Sun▲101We built CircadianLab, a free in-browser tool for lighting design. It uses webGPU shaders to calculate melanopic equivalent daylight illuminance (mel-EDI, formerly EML, relevant for circadian rhythm and WELL v2 compliance), photopic illuminance, UGR glare per CIE 117, and actual daylight through windows and skylights. It has a database of 400,000+ IES files from 81 lighting manufacturers and supports easy sharing of scenes/configs with other people. Daylight uses the NREL Solar Position Algorithm and a Perez clear / intermediate / overcast sky model, mixed into the same…
2020 · innerscene.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Nikmati kemudahan deposit via QRIS, Dana, OVO, LinkAja, GoPay, dan bank BCA/Mandiri/BRI di Buaya138. Proses cepat tanpa potongan. Minimal deposit 10rb.
2019 · sunlight.live · its alternatives →
- 17
CloudMapper helps you analyze your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments. - duo-labs/cloudmapper
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Have a look at the website with an example map, https://www.serverlessmaps.com/, or read the accompanying blog post https://tobilg.com/serverless-maps-for-fun-and-profit
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hey folks, I’m Hassan, one of the co-founders of Infracost (https://www.infracost.io). Infracost helps engineers see and reduce the cloud cost of each infrastructure change before they merge their code. The way Infracost works is we gather pricing data from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. What we call a ‘Pricing Service’, which now holds around 9 million live price points (!!). Then we map these prices to infrastructure code. Once the mapping is done, it enables us to show the cost impact of a code change before it is merged, directly in GitHub, GitLab etc.…
Jan 2026 · dashboard.infracost.io · its alternatives →
- 20PT
This was posted before but I'm quite pleased to share a major update for https://oikolab.com. We now have available seven decades of hourly weather data starting from 1950 for any location in the world, thanks to the recent publication of ERA5 reanalysis data from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). ERA5 is gap-free, gridded dataset generated using data assimilation method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_assimilation), similar to NWP models but with the benefit of hindsight. As far as we're aware of, we're the first weather data…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 21
Cloudnerd▲69Predict the weather by scanning clouds
2022 · welcome-to-cloudnerd.web.app · its alternatives →
- 22N3
Jan 2026 · easy3dmaps.com · its alternatives →
- 23
I wanted to play my Steam games but my aging PC couldn’t keep up, so I built Cloudy Pad - a tool to run Steam in the Cloud (GitHub: https://github.com/PierreBeucher/cloudypad) It runs on AWS, Azure, GCP, Scaleway and Paperspace with various cost optimizations and safeties: - Cost alerts - Auto stop inactive instances to avoid unwanted cost - Disk snapshots and data cleanup for cost efficiency - Spot instance support Under the hood: a Linux VM and a container running Sunshine (a streaming server https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine) with Steam. Most…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Earth▲4An intetractive map of global weather conditions
2015 · earth.nullschool.net · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →