The 3D moving map for business jets. It runs on the cabin server and opens in the browser on every phone and tablet on board, with no app and no internet.
The camera sits at the aircraft's position and altitude and faces the side you sit on. Around it is a cabin window rendered in 3D, with a shade the passenger drags down, and its light shifts from day to golden hour to night with the sun at the aircraft.
Elevation comes from the Copernicus GLO-30 model across the continental US, so canyon walls and valley floors sit where they really are. Imagery across the western US is ESA WorldCover Sentinel-2 at 10 metres. On the demo route, USDA aerial photography takes it to half a metre around Van Nuys and Aspen.
Overview, follow, left window, right window, front, explore and a flat 2D map. Autoplay can cycle through them on a cabin display.
A chase camera behind the jet, drawn as a model of its type in its own livery and lit by the sun.
Hold the microphone and ask “What's on my left?” or “How long until we land?” The cabin server turns the speech into text, works out the answer from the aircraft's own data, and the phone or tablet reads it aloud.
From one tablet, a crew member takes every phone and tablet on board along: their view, the places they open and a laser pointer on the map, about a fifth of a second behind. Passengers can leave and rejoin. When the crew stops, each screen goes back to its own view.
Set the name, logo, colours, font, corner radius and the jet's paint, and watch them on the real map in phone and tablet frames. Export stays locked until every text colour passes WCAG AA contrast. On the aircraft each tail carries its own configuration, and a change reaches every screen without a restart.
Places ahead of the aircraft, ranked by how notable and how near they are, each with a photo and a few lines. “On your left” means your left: a window view only suggests what that window can see.
Two to four and a half minutes before a landmark comes abeam, a note says which side to look. Daylight only, never into a low sun, at most one every five minutes.
Before departure, a welcome card with the operator's note, who is flying and the schedule. After landing, the FBO, the car and any notes. The crew loads the trip on the ground through the Cabin API, and nothing syncs in flight.
Spot the landmark: a countdown to the next place, a score to keep, and facts sized for a child.
The line between day and night moves with the real sun. On the night side, city lights come from NASA's Black Marble, and the stars are placed for the time and position.
Owl View sits on the cabin network beside the systems already there. It listens to the aircraft's position feed and serves the map to every phone, tablet and cabin display that asks for it.
Aircraft position feed
Cabin server
Owl View
Passengers' phones and tablets
Cabin displays
Cabin apps
One server in a container image under 10 MB, for arm64 or amd64 Linux. It serves the map, the tiles, the live position and the voice questions to everyone on board.
Passengers open it in the browser they already have, on iPad, iPhone or Android. Nothing to install. If the connection drops, the map says so and reconnects on its own.
Cabin apps embed it with an iframe or a web component and drive it through a small SDK. The Cabin API answers flight questions, loads the trip and lets the crew switch every screen at once.
The map, the imagery, the terrain and the voice model live on the cabin server, so a full cabin opening Owl View never touches the satellite link. Below are the budgets the product is built to, and what it measured.
Every position from the aircraft is checked for range and for jumps before it reaches a screen. Between updates the jet is carried forward for ten seconds at most; after that it stops and the map is marked stale, and with no valid position it shows the route alone.