Live ships: AIS on a 3D globe from the Danube to Hormuz

What you will see

The icon colour shows the type of ship — tanker, cargo, passenger, fishing or tug. Once the camera is below 40 km, ships turn into silhouettes that change with your viewing angle: from above, oblique or side-on. Click a ship to see a card with its flag, navigation status and the destination typed in by the crew; if the destination matches a known port, OKO draws a straight line to it with an arrival estimate based on speed. A trail shows where the ship came from.

Ships that have not reported for ten minutes turn grey and stay on the map as a last known position for six more hours. On the Danube at Bratislava AIS coverage is confirmed, so you see river traffic there too.

• Chokepoint scenes: Hormuz, Dover and six more — ships, radar and pipelines in one click.
• Ship detections from Sentinel-1 satellite radar via Global Fishing Watch, about three days old.
• Historical shipping density from the World Bank and IMF (2015–2021).

Where the data come from

Live positions come from AISStream.io; when you zoom in, the AISHub network adds more with a delay of 1 to 6 minutes. The browser asks for new positions every 60 seconds and refreshes the current view when the camera stops.

Coverage from coastal AIS receivers is uneven: best in Europe, weaker in Asia and on the open sea. Global Fishing Watch radar detections are licensed CC BY-NC 4.0 and contain modified Copernicus Sentinel data.

What OKO does not do

The number of ships in view is not total traffic, and a radar detection without an AIS match does not prove a “dark” ship. OKO tracks ships as objects, not the people on board.