Interactive Geological Data Visualization in an Immersive Environment

Abstract

Underground flow paths (UFP) often play an important role in the illustration of geological data by geologists, especially in illustrating geological data and revealing stratigraphic structures, which can help domain experts in their exploration of petroleum information. In this paper, we present a new immersive visualization tool to help domain experts better illustrate stratigraphic data. We use a visualization method based on bit-array-based 3-D texture to represent stratigraphic data. Our visualization tool has three major advantages: it allows for flexible interaction at the immersive device, it enables domain experts to obtain their desired UFP structure through the execution of quadratic surface queries, and supports different stratigraphic display modes, as well as switching and integration geological information flexibly. Feedback from domain experts has shown that our tool can contribute more for domain experts in the scientific exploration of stratigraphic data, compared to the existing UFP visualization tools in the field. Thus, experts in geology can have a more comprehensive understanding and more effective illustration of the structure and distribution of UFPs.