The whole network on a globe
We already had two live maps of the network: one for aircraft at /adsb/live and one for ships at /ais/live. Both are flat, and both answer the question well for one region at a time. What they could not do was show the whole thing at once, sky and water together, the way it actually wraps around the planet. So now there is a third view: the live globe.
What is on it
Every aircraft our volunteer ADS-B receivers can hear right now, and every vessel heard by our own AIS receivers. Ships that only come from the outside AIS feed are left out on purpose, because this page is about what the Skydex network itself reaches. The receivers are on it too, as larger dots: gold for aircraft stations, teal for ship stations, grey for the ones that are quiet at the moment. Three buttons above the globe turn each layer on and off.
Zoom in and the dots turn into silhouettes, the same ones as on the flat maps: airliners, props, helicopters and gliders, each pointing the way it is flying, with a dark outline so they stay readable over the ocean. Moving ships become small hulls along their course, and a stopped ship is a ringed dot, because a moored hull keeps sending its last course and that is not where it is going. From further out everything stays a dot, otherwise a thousand silhouettes over Europe merge into one blob.
Aircraft sit at their real altitude. From orbit that means nothing visible: an airliner at 37,000 feet is about 0.17% of the Earth's radius above the surface. Zoom in over a busy airport and you start to see the climb and descent as dots separating from the ground. We could have stretched the altitudes to make the effect dramatic from far away, and decided against it. The globe shows where things are.
The Altitude chip (off by default) colours every aircraft by its height, with the same rainbow the flat maps use for a selected aircraft's trail: orange near the ground, green around 10,000 feet, blue and violet at cruise. A small scale appears under the chips while it's on. Zoom in close and each aircraft also gets a thin line down to the ground, so you can tell a climb out of an airport from traffic passing overhead.
Three Earths
Under the layers there is an Earth switch. Outline is the default: coastlines and a faint grid, the lightest to draw. Map fills the land in, built in your browser from the same coastline file. Satellite puts NASA's Blue Marble imagery on the globe. It's a single picture of the whole planet, downloaded only when you pick it (about 1 MB on a computer, 0.3 MB on a phone), and slightly dimmed so the traffic stays the subject. It is a cloud-free composite, not today's weather, and it gets soft when you zoom right in. The credit to NASA shows under the globe and goes into a saved image. The globe remembers your choice on this device.
How it moves
The positions refresh every ten seconds, the same as the flat maps. In between, every aircraft and every moving ship slides along its own heading at its own speed, so the globe does not jump on each refresh. Tap or click a dot and the line under the globe tells you what it is: the model, the airline and registration, the flight level for aircraft; the type of ship and its speed for vessels. Anonymous aircraft stay anonymous, grey and named only by their type, exactly as on every other map.
The globe opens turned toward your own country, worked out roughly from your connection. After that it is yours: drag to turn it, scroll or pinch to zoom, double-click to go back to the starting view. On a phone a vertical swipe still scrolls the page, so turn the globe with a sideways drag.
What it costs
Nothing new on our side. The page reads the same data the flat live maps read, and the 3D part is drawn entirely in your browser. It loads only when you open this page, so nobody else pays for it.
Where to find it
On a computer it is in the Network menu at the top of every page, next to the aircraft hub, the ships hub and the station leaderboard. On a phone that menu folds into More, and the globe is listed there. Inside the game it sits in the menu with the other network pages, and the live feed, both flat live maps, both hubs and your receiver page link to it as well. If you run a receiver and want your antenna to show up on it, connect it here. The station dot sits on the nearest city, never on your exact position.
Update: questions answered on the page
The page now explains itself below the globe. It prints how many aircraft and vessels the network heard at the moment it loaded, how many receivers are online and in how many countries, then what the layers mean, where the data comes from, and short answers to the questions people ask first: is it real time, why is the sky empty over my area, why do some aircraft have no name. Two buttons sit at the top: one to connect your own receiver, one to fly over the same Earth in the game. Tap an aircraft and the line under the globe now links to its page, or to its type page if nobody has caught it yet. A link to the globe shared in a chat now shows a picture of the globe with the current counts.