Immersive Analytics for Geology: Field Sketch-Like Visualization to assist geological structure analysis during field work

TRIPPEL NAGEL, J. M.; BJERG, E. A.; GAZCÓN, NICOLÁS F.; GANUZA, M. L.; LARREGUI, J. I.; CASTRO, S. M.

Phoenix

Workshop; IEEE VIS - Workshop on Immersive Analytics: Exploring Future Interaction and Visualization Technologies for Data Analytics; 2017

IEEE/ACM

We explore if and how immersive analytics, in particular AR andSketch-Like Visualization, can be used to support the geologists?field workflow. Fieldwork involves careful observations and measurementsin the field, the collection of rock and fossil samples andthe recording of complementary information for further analysis. Inthe field, the workflow comprises in-situ hand drawing of sketchesthrough careful observation of the area to be explored and the incorporationof all the data that the geologist collects in the field to these drawings. This implies that a constant association of 2D (sketch)-3D (real environment) information is being carried out at all times, taking into account a previously defined scale of work.Our main goal is to support the field workflow integrating the real environment with an automatically generated sketch to facilitate the geologists? fieldwork. Our system is based on an interactive AR approach on mobile devices. We evaluated the introduced approach using a real-life case study. User feedback and observations from our interdisciplinary team indicate the utility of the approach for the current case study as well as some shortcomings and areas for future research.