Visualization of Geological Data in Virtual Environments

In this talk we describe tools and techniques for the exploration of geo-scientific data from the oil and gas domain in stereoscopic virtual environments. The two main sources of data in the exploration task are seismic volumes and multivariate well logs of physical properties down a bore hole. We have developed a props-based interaction device called the cubic mouse to allow more direct and intuitive interaction with a cubic seismic volume. The device consists of a cube-shaped box with three perpendicular rods passing through the center and buttons on the top for additional control. The rods represent the X, Y, and Z axes of a given coordinate system. Pushing and pulling the rods specifies constrained motion along the corresponding axes. Twisting the rods typically rotations around the corresponding axes. Embedded within the device is a six degree of freedom tracking sensor, which allows the rods to be continually aligned with a coordinate system located in a virtual world. This device effectively places the seismic cube in the user's hand. We have also integrated the device with other visualization systems for crash engineers and flow simulations. In these systems the Cubic Mouse controls the position and orientation of a virtual model and the rods move three orthogonal cutting or slicing planes through the model. We have also developed a 3D texture based multi-resolution approach for handling massive volumetric data sets common in the oil and gas industry, the medical domain, and as a result from computer simulations. Due to the restricted texture memory available and the limited bandwidth into the texture memory, these data sets cannot be rendered at full resolution. Our approach uses a two-level hierarchical paging technique to guarantee a given frame rate. This technique displays lower resolutions of the data when a slice or volume rendering is moved fast through the data set, and fills in the high resolution, when the user slows down or stops. This behaviour correlates really well with motion blur.