Why we built Blueye Cloud
Every Blueye operator we talk to runs into the same problem sooner or later. Inspection data piles up across the fleet — dive logs on one tablet, video on another, photos on a hard drive, multibeam recordings on a third. Drones move between operators and projects, batteries and payloads change hands at the quay, and by the time someone asks "which drone did we use on that aquaculture survey in March, and where are the photos?" — the answer is usually a guess. Or you spend an afternoon scrubbing through a 40-minute dive video to find the second where the diver said "the anode is gone".
Introducing Blueye Cloud
Blueye Cloud launches in open beta today at cloud.blueye.no. It is a fully hosted online service for organisations that operate Blueye underwater drones, with eight modules that together cover the full inspection workflow:
- Fleet management — a live picture of every drone, battery, and peripheral, built automatically from the dive logs you upload.
- Dive playback — every dive replayed on a map with a depth-coloured track, time-synced video, photos, and multibeam playback in the browser.
- Projects — group dives, missions, attachments, and custom map layers into a shareable inspection report.
- Mission planning — design waypoint missions and survey areas on a browser-based mission planner, then export them to the Blueye App.
- Sharing — secret links or email invitations let you hand a dive or a project to anyone, with no Blueye account required on the other end.
- AI assistance — opt-in voice transcription, photo descriptions, and inspection-report generation, all hosted on Azure OpenAI in Norway.
- Live streaming — push live video from a 5G-connected drone straight into the cloud over RTMP.
- Custom map layers — bring your own bathymetry tilesets and vector overlays (GeoJSON, KML, TopoJSON) to every map view.
Hosted in Norway. Blueye Cloud runs on Azure infrastructure in the Norway East region — including the Azure OpenAI deployment that powers every AI feature. Your dive logs, video, photos, and AI processing stay inside the Norwegian data perimeter, which matters when you operate in European, public-sector, defence, or maritime contexts where data residency is part of the contract.
Sign-in is handled by Microsoft Entra, so you can either create a Blueye Cloud account with email and password or sign in with your existing Microsoft work account — Blueye does not store your credentials. Single sign-on with your organisation's Microsoft work account is supported out of the box. Every organisation has Admin, Operator, and Viewer roles, so you can invite colleagues, customers, or external partners with exactly the level of access they need. Every privileged action — sharing a dive, deleting a project, changing a member's role — is recorded in an audit log that admins can review at any time.
Built from your dive logs
There are two ways to get data into Blueye Cloud. Most customers will use the Blueye iOS, Android, or Windows app, which can be configured to sync new dives in the background. You can also use the Blunux Web App to download data directly from the drone over Wi-Fi to your computer and drag and drop files straight into the browser uploader.
However the data arrives, Blueye Cloud parses every .bez log file and uses it to assemble your fleet picture automatically:
- Drones are created from their serial number the first time you upload a dive from them.
- Batteries and peripherals — grippers, multibeam sonars, DVLs, GPS modules, lasers — are tracked individually with their own dive history.
- Equipment notes let you keep service logs and comments on each item.
The drone, battery, and peripheral pages always reflect the configuration from the most recently uploaded dive, so questions like "where was the detachable Newton gripper last used?" take a single click to answer. The fleet map gives you a single view of where every drone has been deployed — useful when you operate one drone from a single quay, indispensable when you have a fleet spread across an entire country, as our aquaculture customers typically do.
One side-effect of feeding everything through Blueye Cloud is that it all becomes searchable. The command palette runs a single full-text search across drones, dives, equipment, media files, and — when you opt in to voice transcription — every spoken segment of every dive video. Type "crab", a battery serial number, or any phrase from a narrated dive, and you land on the result in one keystroke.
Replay every dive on a map
Every dive opens to a familiar layout: a summary card with operator, depth, duration, battery consumption, the equipment that was attached, and a depth/battery profile from the telemetry log. Tag the dive, give it a name, and add observations as you would expect.
The map view is where it gets interesting. The dive track is animated along a timeline you can scrub or play back with the spacebar. Toggle depth colouring and the path goes from blue at the surface to red at the deepest points. As the playhead moves, time-synced photos and video appear on the map at the exact location they were captured.
And then there is the multibeam. Blueye Cloud plays back .mbez multibeam recordings as a live, depth-coloured fan rendered in WebGL right on the dive map — no specialised software, no plugin, no separate viewer. As far as we know, no other inspection platform does this in a browser.
When you want to share a dive with someone outside your organisation, click Share and choose between an email invitation (the recipient signs in to confirm their identity) or a public secret link that anyone with the URL can open. Either way, they get the full dive experience — map, timeline, media, telemetry — in their browser, with no Blueye account, no sign-up, no install. A customer can be replaying your inspection 30 seconds after you send the link — see for yourself with our example dive, no sign-up required.
Projects, annotations, and inspection reports (Pro plan)
A single dive is rarely the full story of an inspection. You recover the drone, swap a battery, and the next time you power up you get a new dive log. Projects are how you stitch those individual dives back into one cohesive piece of work — a single shareable container for the dives, the media, the planned mission, attachments such as PDFs and reference photos, and any custom map overlays. The project map shows the full inspection on one canvas, with every photo and multibeam recording in place, and supports image overlays so you can pin a ship outline or a structural drawing onto the map for context.
Annotations are how you mark up findings on the dive timeline, and they are configurable per organisation. Out of the box you get a sensible set — verification, marine life, hazard, finding, comment — but you can define your own structure with custom names, icons, and colours, so the system fits the way your team already classifies findings on a fish farm, a harbour structure, or a ship hull. Syncing the annotation catalogue to the Blueye App is on the roadmap, so operators will be able to apply your organisation's own types directly from the app during the dive — pinning a finding, hazard, or marine-life observation onto the timeline at the moment it happens, rather than after the fact.
A block-based report editor lets you assemble a draft inspection report inside the project. You can write it by hand, embedding rich previews of media files that link straight to the right second of video, or — once you opt in to the AI features — let Blueye Cloud generate a first draft for you. When the report is ready, share it with a stakeholder using the same secret-link or email-invite flow as for individual dives, with the option to require sign-in if the content is sensitive. You can browse a complete example project without signing in — same view your customer would get from a shared link.
In-browser mission planning
The Blueye drone has supported semi-autonomous waypoint missions for a long time. Until now, missions had to be planned on the device that would execute them. Blueye Cloud adds a richer, browser-based mission planner — desktop-class real estate, no install — where you can sketch a route on a large map, drop waypoints, and add survey areas that generate a lawnmower coverage pattern with configurable lane spacing, heading, and depth.
A timeline at the bottom simulates the depth profile and tells you up front how long the mission will take and how much area it will cover. Missions can be exported to the same JSON format the Blueye App already uses, so you can fly them today — and a deeper integration that pushes missions straight from the cloud into the app is on the roadmap.
Custom map layers (Pro plan)
Out of the box you get OpenStreetMap, satellite imagery, and marine charts as basemaps — but real inspection work often needs more context than that. Upload your own bathymetry surveys and site charts as MBTiles tilesets (PMTiles is also supported), and bring any vector data — fish-farm cages, harbour structures, pipeline routes — as GeoJSON, TopoJSON, KML, or KMZ. Layers can be scoped to a single project or shared across the entire organisation, so your customer's own site data sits underneath every dive their team replays.
AI assistance — opt in, in your control
We have added an AI module to Blueye Cloud, but none of it is enabled by default. Each AI feature is something your organisation explicitly opts in to from settings, and the first opt-in is recorded in the audit log. All AI processing runs on Azure OpenAI hosted in Norway, and none of your data is used to train the underlying models.
There are four AI features in this first release.
Voice transcription
If your dive video has narration — recorded with the Voice Recording feature we shipped in the Blueye App earlier this year — Blueye Cloud transcribes it into searchable subtitles. The transcript becomes part of global search: type "crab" into the command palette and you jump straight to the second of video where someone said the word.
AI video-frame annotations
Pause the dive video on something interesting and click Annotate with AI — Blueye Cloud grabs the frame, runs it through the same vision model used for photos, and drops a draft annotation onto the timeline at the exact second you paused. Useful when something flashes past on the video that you want logged without rewinding through the dive yourself.
AI photo descriptions
The "Describe with AI" action on any photo generates a caption and suggests tags from your organisation's own tag catalogue. Useful for working through the hundreds of photos a single survey can produce.
AI-generated inspection reports (Pro plan)
Inside a project, the AI report block assembles a first-draft markdown report from the dives, annotations, photos, voice transcripts, and missions in the project. It cites the sources it used — embedding videos at the exact second a finding was discussed, linking back to photos and annotations — so the draft is grounded in the actual inspection data, not invented from thin air. You can then refine the draft with follow-up prompts ("remove the paragraph about marine life, add a note about the weather and turbidity") or edit it by hand.
Usage is metered against a monthly quota that is visible in Org Settings → Usage, alongside storage, so there are no surprises.
Live streaming over RTMP (Pro plan)
If your drone is operated from a 5G-connected device, Blueye Cloud can act as your live streaming server. From any drone in the fleet view, click Live streaming to get an RTMP endpoint and a stream key. Punch those into the Blueye App and the drone goes live in the cloud, viewable in the browser via WHEP or LL-HLS for sub-second latency. Live telemetry and live sonar are coming next, but this is the foundation.
Pricing and the open beta launch
Blueye Cloud opens in beta today with two plans:
- Free. 5 GB of storage, full fleet and equipment management, dive analytics and the dive map, the media library, sharing, and a monthly AI quota of 10 minutes of voice transcription and 50,000 tokens for photo descriptions and reports. More than enough to evaluate the platform on a real fleet.
- Pro. 100 GB of storage. Everything in Free, plus projects and AI inspection reports, live streaming, custom map layers, and a much larger AI quota — 500 minutes of voice transcription and 2 million tokens for AI reports, photo descriptions, and frame annotations per month.
Both plans are available from launch. Sign up at cloud.blueye.no, upload a dive log, and you should have a populated fleet view within a couple of minutes.
Looking ahead
This release is the beginning, not the end. We are already working on tighter integration with the Blueye App so missions sync both ways automatically, richer live streaming with telemetry and sonar overlays, smarter semantic search on top of the existing keyword search across drones, dives, equipment, media, and transcripts, and continued investment in the AI features as the underlying models improve.
The most important thing now is to get Blueye Cloud into the hands of the people who use Blueye drones every day, and listen carefully to what works and what does not. Open beta means this is a real product you can use today — one that will keep evolving as we listen to feedback and suggestions from our customers. Some workflows will surprise you, some will be missing the polish they'll have in six months, and a few features will change as we listen to the first wave of customers using it on their actual fleets. Whatever you upload during the beta is yours: your dives, media, and reports stay in your account when Blueye Cloud exits beta. There is a feedback button in the top bar of every page in Blueye Cloud, and we read every submission. If you operate a Blueye drone — whether you have one Pioneer or a fleet of X3s scattered across half a country — please sign up, try it on your own data, and tell us where it works and where it does not.
Try Blueye Cloud free at cloud.blueye.no, or take it for a spin right now: replay our example dive or explore the example inspection project — no sign-up required.
Contact our sales team if you need volume storage, dedicated onboarding, or custom terms.
