Overview

Realtime.Earth turns every camera, sensor, and GPS device into a shared, georeferenced layer of situational awareness. Given any camera feed, whether a phone held by a participant, a fixed monitoring camera, or an aerial platform, the system determines exactly where the camera is, which direction it is pointing, and what it is looking at on the landscape. Every pixel in the feed gets a real-world coordinate: latitude, longitude, and altitude. That means features of interest can be annotated directly onto the live image, alongside known geospatial layers such as forecast boundaries, weather data, GPS positions of vehicles and aircraft, and the locations of people and assets. Realtime.Earth applies to any event where distributed, real-time spatial awareness matters: concerts, sporting events, field research, construction, agricultural operations, or community gatherings.

Alert.live applies the same georectification technology to emergency events. When a wildfire, flood, or other hazard threatens a community, citizens receive a text alert containing a link to a web map centered on their location. From that map they can open their phone's camera, and the feed is georectified in real time so that incident commanders see what the citizen sees, placed precisely on the landscape. Layers can be kept private, shared with specific groups, or made completely public. Each view becomes a relevant operating picture, fusing and filtering intelligence to the decisions that person needs to make. Users can seamlessly transition from a 2D map view to a full 3D scene, placing the event on the actual terrain for deeper spatial understanding. The result is a distributed sensor network that scales with the population at risk, giving responders ground-truth imagery from every angle while giving residents direct, actionable awareness of the threat relative to where they are.

Both platforms are complementary to the simtable, a tangible computing surface that runs wildfire and flood simulations on real terrain at the speed of touch. The simtable is most widely used for community outreach, helping citizens understand their risks and organize collective action for resilience in natural disasters. Realtime.Earth and alert.live extend that spatial intelligence into the field and directly to the public during live events.

The videos below document field deployments during actual wildfire incidents, alongside demonstrations of interoperability with partner platforms.