Where cotton grows, where fabric and clothing are made, which ports they leave from, and the sea lanes in between, drawn on a photorealistic globe next to live ships, wildfires and weather. Ask the globe questions out loud.
Textile Globe puts the textile supply chain on one globe. It starts with cotton. Twenty-eight growing regions, from Gujarat to Xinjiang and the Nile Delta. Then the places where fabric and clothing are made. Forty-one manufacturing hubs, like Tiruppur, Dhaka and Ho Chi Minh City. Thirty-six container ports and eleven trade lanes connect them to buyers around the world. On top of that, live ship positions stream in as vessels sail. And live fire detections flag risk near growing regions. The textile layers are a curated starter dataset. Live feeds run while the builder's computer is on. Built on the open-source God's Eye View.
Status: working prototype. The textile layers are a hand-curated starter dataset. A hosted copy of the app is online. Ships, fires and weather on it are live while the builder's computer is switched on and online; when it is off those layers show as unavailable. Voice only works when you run the app yourself. The video below shows it in action.
A shirt crosses several continents before it reaches a shop. Cotton may be grown in one country, spun in a second, sewn in a third and shipped through a fourth. The facts that matter to a buyer, a planner or an analyst sit in separate places: farm regions in agricultural reports, factories in supplier lists, ships in tracking tools, weather and fires in yet more feeds.
Putting those facts on one map makes questions easier to ask. Is a cotton belt under a fire or a storm? Which ports sit on the lane my goods use? How many ships are heading for the same port?
Textile Globe is a fork of the open-source God's Eye View world monitor (MIT licence, by Bilawal Sidhu). We kept its photorealistic globe, live feeds and voice control, and rebuilt the layer list around the textile industry.
Texas High Plains to Xinjiang, Gujarat, the Nile Delta and Mato Grosso, each with a short note.
Tiruppur, Gazipur, Keqiao, Ho Chi Minh City, Faisalabad, Istanbul, Prato and more.
Shanghai, Chattogram, Nhava Sheva, Rotterdam, Los Angeles / Long Beach and others.
Asia to Europe via Suez, the trans-Pacific, Brazil to Asia and more, drawn as route lines.
Live today: vessel positions (AISStream), active fires (NASA FIRMS) and weather layers. Voice: say "show cotton regions" or "take me to Tiruppur". Click any marker for its detail card.
The four textile layers are curated static files, not live feeds. Place names and coordinates were written from general knowledge and are approximate until reviewed.
Your browser draws the globe. A small local server holds the access keys and forwards requests to outside services, so keys never reach the page. Textile layers are plain data files shipped with the code.
Full detail is in the technical architecture.
This table maps each stated requirement to what exists today. It is deliberately not all green.
| Requirement | Status | Reality today |
|---|---|---|
| Show cotton fields | Built | 28 curated regions as markers with notes. Static, region-level, not field-level. |
| Show manufacturing locations | Built | 41 hub-level clusters. Not individual factories or mills. |
| Show shipping routes | Built | 11 lanes as lines, plus 36 ports. Lanes are simplified waypoint chains, not real vessel tracks. |
| Everything live | Partial | Ships, fires and weather are live. The textile layers themselves are curated and do not update. |
| Only textile content | Partial | Unrelated layers are hidden from the panel but still in the code. The page title and first-run screen are still generic. |
| Voice control | Built | Works through an experimental ChatGPT sign-in. Voice knows the textile layer names but not textile questions yet. |
| Seen working in a browser | Partial | App loads with no errors and tests pass (6,214). Each textile layer has not yet been visually confirmed on the globe. |
| Cargo-only ship filter | Roadmap | The ships layer shows all vessel types. |
| Weather and crop signals over cotton regions | Roadmap | Weather layers exist globally but are not tied to regions. |
| Port congestion estimate | Roadmap | Not started. |
| Voice without any OpenAI account | Roadmap | An on-device voice option exists upstream, not adopted yet. |
| Narrated demo video | Built | 64-second walkthrough recorded from the hosted app, with a computer-generated voice. A studio-quality voiceover is not done. |
| Hosted live demo | Partial | A hosted copy is online with no sign-in or PIN. Live ships, fires and weather are relayed from the builder's own computer, so they only work while it is on. Voice and the AI summary do not work there. |
| Independent data accuracy review | Roadmap | Not done. |
The public site has two parts. The pages and map are static files on a hosting service. The live data (ships, fires, weather) is fetched from a small read-only server running on the builder's computer, reached through an encrypted tunnel that only passes a short list of data requests. If that computer is off or asleep, the site still loads and the live layers report unavailable. Keys stay on that computer; the public pages carry only the keys designed to be visible in a browser. An always-on server, voice online and a PIN in front are planned, not built.
A hosted copy needs no login; its live layers work while the builder's computer is on, and voice is off there. To run the full app on your own computer you need Node.js 24.14 or newer (24.x or 26.x are supported):
git clone https://github.com/nishadiyer/World-Monitor.git
cd World-Monitor
npm ci
npm run dev
# open http://localhost:4173It starts with no keys: satellite imagery, terrain and several live layers work immediately. Optional free keys add 3D tiles, ships, fires, traffic and street photos. Open Data Layers and switch on the Textile Supply Chain group. Setup, voice and keys are covered in the documentation.