Visualization in Copenhagen, part 1

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It's finally here! The round-up of projects from the Subsurface Hacakthon in Copenhagen last month. This is the first of two posts presenting the teams and their efforts, in the same random order the teams presented them at the end of the event.

Subsurface data meets Pokemon Go

Team Geo Go: Karine Schmidt, Max Gribner, Hans Sturm (all from Wintershall), Stine Lærke Andersen (University of Copenhagen), Ole Johan Hornenes (University of Bergen), Per Fjellheim (Emerson), Arne Kjetil Andersen (Emerson), Keith Armstrong (Dell EMC). 

Project: With Pokemon Go as inspiration, the team set out to prototype a geoscience visualization app that placed interactive subsurface data elements into a realistic 3D environment.

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Visualizing blind spots in data

Team Blind Spots: Jo Bagguley (UK Oil & Gas Authority), Duncan Irving (Teradata), Laura Froelich (Teradata), Christian Hirsch (Aalborg University), Sean Walker (Campbell & Walker Geophysics).

Tech: Flask, Bokeh, AWS for hosting app. GitHub repo.

Project: Data management always comes up as an issue in conversations about geocomputing, but few are bold enough to tackle it head on. This team built components for checking the integrity of large amounts of raw data, before passing it to data science projects. Project page.

Sean, Laura, and Christian. Jo and Duncan were out doing research. Note the kanban board in the background — agile all the way!

Sean, Laura, and Christian. Jo and Duncan were out doing research. Note the kanban board in the background — agile all the way!

Volume uncertainties visualization

Team Fortuna: Natalia Shchukina (Total), Behrooz Bashokooh (Shell), Tobias Staal (University of Tasmania), Robert Leckenby (now Agile!), Graham Brew (Dynamic Graphics), Marco van Veen (RWTH Aachen). 

Tech: Flask, Bokeh, Altair, Holoviews. GitHub repo.

Project: Natalia brought some data with her: lots of surface grids. The team built a web app to compute uncertainty sections and maps, then display them dynamically and interactively — eliciting audible gasps from the room. Project page.

The Fortuna app: Probability of being the the zone (left) and entropy (right). Cross-sections are shown at the top, maps on the bottom.

Differences and similarities with RGB blends

Team RGBlend: Melanie Plainchault and Jonathan Gallon (Total), Per Olav Svendsen, Jørgen Kvalsvik and Max Schuberth (Equinor).

Tech: Python, Bokeh. GitHub repo.

Project: One of the more intriguing ideas of the hackathon was not just so much a fancy visualization technique, as a novel way of producing a visualization — differencing 3 images and visualizing the differences in RGB space. It reminded me of an old blog post about the spot the difference game. Project page.

The differences (lower right) between three time-lapse seismic amplitude maps.

The differences (lower right) between three time-lapse seismic amplitude maps.

Augmented reality geological maps

Team AR Sandbox: Simon Virgo (RWTH Aachen), Miguel de la Varga (RWTH Aachen), Fabian Antonio Stamm (RWTH Aachen), Alexander Schaaf (University of Aberdeen).

Tech: Gempy. GitHub repo.

Project: I don't have favourite projects, but if I did, this would be it. The GemPy group had already built their sandbox when they arrived, but they extended it during the hackathon. Wonderful stuff. Project page.

magic box of sand: Sculpting a landscape (left), and the projected map (right). You can't even imagine how much fun it was to play with.

Augmented reality seismic wavefields

Team Sandbox Seismics: Yuriy Ivanov (NTNU Trondheim), Ana Lim (NTNU Trondheim), Anton Kühl (University of Copenhagen), Jean Philippe Montel (Total).

Tech: GemPy, Devito. GitHub repo.

Project: This team worked closely with Team AR Sandbox, but took it in a different direction. They instead read the velocity from the surface of the sand, then used devito to simulate a seismic wavefield propagating across the model, and projected that wavefield onto the sand. See it in action in my recent Code Show post. Project page.

Yuriy Ivanov demoing the seismic wavefield moving across the sandbox.

Pretty cool, right? As usual, all of these projects were built during the hackathon weekend, almost exclusively by teams that formed spontaneously at the event itself (I think one team was self-contained from the start). If you didn't notice the affiliations of the participants — go back and check them out; I think this might have been an unprecedented level of collaboration!

Next time we'll look at the other six projects. [UPDATE: Next post is here.]

Before you go, check out this awesome video Wintershall made about the event. A massive thank you to them for supporting the event and for recording this beautiful footage — and for agreeing to share it under a CC-BY license. Amazing stuff!