Immersive Analytics for Geology: Field Sketch-Based Visualization to assist geological structure analysis during fieldwork

NICOLAS GAZCON; LUJÁN GANUZA; JUAN IGNACIO LARREGUI; SILVIA CASTRO; JUAN MANUEL TRIPPEL NAGEL; ERNESTO BJERG

Phoenix

Workshop; 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 fieldto these drawings. This implies that a constant association of 2D(sketch)-3D (real environment) information is being carried out atall times, taking into account a previously defined scale of work.Our main goal is to support the field workflow integrating the realenvironment with an automatically generated sketch to facilitate thegeologists? fieldwork. Our system is based on an interactive ARapproach on mobile devices. We evaluated the introduced approachusing a real-life case study. User feedback and observations fromour interdisciplinary team indicate the utility of the approach for thecurrent case study as well as some shortcomings and areas for futureresearch.