Immersive Virtual Fieldwork: Advances for the Petroleum Industry

Laser scanning and photogrammetry techniques have been broadly adopted by Oil&Gas industry for modeling petroleum reservoir analogues. Beyond the benefits of digital data itself, computer systems employed by geoscientists for interpretation and modeling tasks provide high quality rendering, point clouds surface meshes and photo-realistic textured models. But these systems, commonly, have used 2-D display, the 3-D models and information are projected on the screen, providing a limited visualization and restrictive toolset for interpretation. This work proposes to break this paradigm by developing a fully immersive system capable to virtually teleport the geoscientists to the fieldwork and provide a complete toolset for the outcrop's interpretation. Besides, the system has been evaluated and validated by geologists with different skills and it has emerged as an useful and attractive toolset for Oil&Gas industry.