Development in visualisation software

It’s for this reason countries like Australia have taken a leading role in the development of visualisation software and the industry has recognised the value of such tools for exploration purposes.
A Canadian company is now following suit with the development of new software called ParaViewGeo. The company claims that ParaViewGeo is a unique visualisation tool because it embraces open source principles—there are no licensing fees, it can be downloaded at no cost and the source code is freely available. With the source code available, modifications can be made to suit custom needs and allow for innovative approaches to visualisation and discovery.
The company developing ParaViewGeo is MIRARCO, the Mining Innovation, Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation based in Sudbury, Canada. MIRARCO is known for its use of virtual reality in exploration and mining.
ParaViewGeo is an extension of Kitware’s ‘ParaView’, a scientific visualisation tool proven to be reliable and able to handle very large datasets.
“We saw the need for, and potential benefit of having an open source visualisation tool for the mining industry and so we approached Kitware with the idea and they were very supportive,” said Andrew Dasys, MIRARCO’s vice president, commercialisation.
“We’d like ParaViewGeo to give mining and geoscience professionals a stronger sense of control over their data and the way it’s viewed. In building upon ParaView, we also take advantage of the significant financial investment into ParaView by several leading U.S. laboratories.”
“It’s multi processor ready; ParaViewGeo has been demonstrated to work on terabyte sized datasets. As mining develops new sensing technologies, begins to adopt conditional simulation and to model uncertainty, datasets will evolve. ParaViewGeo can accommodate these new parameters and meet future challenges,” said Dasys.
ParaViewGeo allows data to be read from more than 40 different file types while scripting allows the program to read custom formats as well. This is potentially helpful for smaller mining companies who may have exploration data from multiple sources - they can all be woven into a common model for interpretation.
Mining companies have also found visualisation to be a valuable communication tool for investor relations purposes. Using this medium, a presentation can make a highly persuasive case for the merits of investing in a particular operation. A 3D model of an ore body has far more impact on investors than a slideshow of tables, images and numbers.
A free download and tutorial can be found at http://paraviewgeo.mirarco.org