Virtual Environments Program

The Virtual Environments (VE) Program is concerned with the effective application of VE to industrial and scientific three-dimensional modelling and computer simulation tasks. A VE is created when a combination of one or more technologies (3D graphics, acoustics, haptics) is used to produce surroundings that is either familiar to a viewer, such as inside a building, or enables a viewer to be placed in a surrounding that is normally inaccessible, such as a particle accelerator. The main benefit of VE is user interaction in real-time with little awareness of the human-computer interface.

A number of research projects made up the VE Program:

• Visualisation of Ore Grade Estimations (VISOR)

• 3D Interactive Environment for Geophysics (3DINFO)

• Collaborative VE (COVE)

• Haptic Workbench Software (HWS)

• Haptic Workbench Mining Applications (HWMA)

Research focused on developing toolkits and software frameworks that would be of benefit to the mining industry in visualising geostatistical computations. This emphasis was later extended to supporting research that combined haptic and visualisation technologies, and to investigating their cross-industry capabilities.

Program Highlights

Development of VE Laboratory, equipped with:

• One Onyx2 SGI Visual Supercomputer with two Infinite Reality graphics pipes, eight R10000 processors, 3gigabytes of RAM, 40 gigabytes of disk
  

• One Octane SGI Workstation
  

• Two Haptic Workbenches in Canberra
  

• One BARCO Baron large-format projection table display system

Development of Haptic Workbench, combining a Fakespace MiniWorkbench and a SensAble Technologies PHANTOM 3.0 robotic arm, which is used as a 3D haptic interaction device. Programming for the small-scale immersive environment is primarily in C++ for compiled code and Python interpreted code.

The software library includes:

• GHOST – a haptic rendering software development environment developed by SensAble Technologies.
  

• MAGMA – a multi-sensory software development environment with one conceptual hapto-visual scenegraph developed by ACSys and ReachIn Technologies.

Haptics allows users to feel constraints and manipulate stereoscopic images that they are viewing.

Development of VISOR software providing statistical analysis (variography) used to support interpolation algorithms (Kriging and Indicator Kriging) in an interactive visualisation-based environment. Snowden Associates is commercialising VISOR software, targeting the mining industry.

Development of VE toolkits (haptic constraints, wavelets, deformable surfaces) and licences to Fractal Graphics, ReachIn Technologies, and Agents.
Development of the Structured Information Explorer using Java3D.

Completion of contract research for BHP Research Laboratories to demonstrate the use of haptics in petroleum exploration, using seismic data as the test set. This led to further collaboration with BHP and its Petroleum Division.

Presentation of early Downhole Transient Electromagnetism prototype software to WMC Resources. WMC Resources and Fractal Graphics have commercialisation rights to develop the Haptic Workbench for operational trials at WMC mine sites.

Major collaboration with Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Fractal Graphics, BHP and Sydney VisLab to evaluate 3D Projection Tables.

Development of Human-Machine Virtual Environment (HMCE) interfaces for the remote operation of robotic systems.

Initial work on the development of vGRID, an infrastructure for the effective use of collaborative VE.