'PUTTING IT ON THE TABLE' - VIRTUAL AND AUGMENTED REALITY TECHNOLOGIES FOR EXPERIMENTAL GEOLOGY AND EDUCATION

The analysis of the enormous amount of data such as acquired by the oil and gas industry for the exploration of potential new reservoirs challenges the team of experts that are tasked to sight and interpret the data. Mostly performed with sophisticated software systems on desktop workstations, the small display size and the conventional desktop interface strongly contradict the task requirements for analyzing three-dimensional subsurface structures and well topologies that need to be studied and discussed in interdisciplinary teams.

Here, Virtual and Augmented Reality promised to provide valuable means for interactive data analysis, but the underlying technologies still create a cumbersome work environment that is inadequate for clinical employment. A major shortcoming of such environments is still a lack of perceptive, direct-manipulative, multi-modal interaction with the displayed data set. Moreover, Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies tend to grow its users 'lonely' by restricting them from sharing the same perspective onto a data set (due to the limitation of the display hardware to generate perspectively correct stereoscopic imagery for multiple users) or by prohibiting direct social interaction among users, e.g., in fully-immersive setups employing head-mounted displays, thus ruling out collaborative decision making.

In realization of these shortcomings of Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies, we are focusing our research and development efforts onto two main areas:

Perceptive interaction with multi-dimensional data in immersive and semi-immersive environments combines the advantages of the familiar 2D interfaces with the superiority of virtual environments with respect to direct manipulation and perception. The developed 'StudyDesk' system is a combination of an interaction-rich VR system and a volume-rendering system and is designed to enable users to view and analyze the data in stereoscopic projection.

Stereoscopic multi-user displays combining the advantages of Virtual and Augmented Reality technology address the need for collaboration in decision making and educational processes. With the 'Virtual Showcase' we are developing a new projection-based Augmented Reality display that allows multi-user collaboration and walk-around inspection of 3D data sets.