Seminar - Dr Tomasz Bednarz - CSIRO’s Virtual Mining Centre (VMC) at QCAT in Brisbane

Tuesday 25 May 2010, 9.00 am - 10.00 am
Civil Engineering Lecture Theatre 4

Dr Tomasz Bednarz
CSIRO Earth Science and Resource Engineering

Abstract:
The presentation concerns immersive virtual and augmented reality experiments carried out for prospective applications in the mining industry at CSIRO’s VMC in Brisbane. Demonstrated technologies are suitable for use in generic training and e-learning engineering fields.

Visualisation is handled by the Unity3D 2.5 multiplatform game development tool, which communicates over .Net socket servers with data feeds from a 5DT Data Glove Ultra that measures finger flexures, and an iPhone based touchpad device. The iPhone also provides orientation data pertaining to acceleration and rotational attributes, such as, pitch, roll and yaw. The user is placed at the focal point of a 4-m dome and experiences the immersive virtual reality environment display. Navigation and object manipulation by the user is made possible through the combination of hardwired buttons, in-world selection techniques and gesture recognition. The techniques are directly applicable to the monitoring of real mining environments, in which mining equipment is surrounded by various sensor networks.

The presentation is not limited to mining industry. It includes prospective applications of the newest technology to different fields of science and engineering, i.e. inertial navigation systems (= GPS underground), 360 degree cameras for tele-operation scenarios, thermo-vision cameras (for detection of people moving in dangerous environments), and many more.