Veritas
DGC Inc. Selects INT Geotoolkit C++ Software to Develop EXPOSE, a Desktop Seismic
Visualization Module for its Vega Seismic Processing System
The
Challenge
Veritas
wanted a more powerful and cost-effective new way to display their seismic data
library to potential clients. Historically, data sales representatives used third
party products requiring data format changes and multiple copies of the data.
More recently, clients would be invited to the company's visualization centers
to work with detailed displays of huge data volumes.
While developing
their in-house package of seismic utilities (collectively known as Vega),
the marketing potential for using components of this package to bring
virtual data to the client's doorstep was quickly realized. By taking
advantage of the EXPOSE module and adding a few inexpensive peripheral
devices to their laptop computers, the Veritas marketing staff would
be able to carry huge volumes of the company's data library around with
them and offer their customers the ability to visualize and interact
with the data on-site.
The
INT Solution
Vega was initially targeted for Unix, and Veritas originally selected
both Motif and INT's GeoToolkit C++ for the graphical development environment.
However, as the requirement to run on both Windows and Linux desktop
environments became important, Motif was replaced by Qt, a cross-platform
GUI development environment by Trolltech AS. According to Gill Howell,
Manager of Interactive Software Development at Veritas, switching to
Qt involved a rewrite of all of Veritas' Motif GUI code. However, almost
no change was required for the code that had been developed with INT's
GeoToolkit - a major benefit of GeoToolkit's platform independent design.
Functionality
for the portable version of EXPOSE includes the ability to zoom in and out of
the seismic data, scroll, change scale, change colors, change gain and look at
RMS amplitude values on specific anomalies and do comparisons between different
sections.
The
Result
The first
trial has been in the Asia Pacific region. The system holds the equivalent of
100,000 kilometers of 2D data at 8-second record lengths. Veritas and its customers
are particularly happy with the outstanding graphical resolution and performance
of the system. They also appreciate the ability of EXPOSE to read data in Veritas'
native processing format, eliminating the time-consuming step of converting the
data into another format before it can be read by off-the-shelf viewing tools.
"Veritas
is clearly ahead of its competition here," remarked one client geophysicist
in Perth, "and we see this system as an industry first in the region."
By
now, most GeoToolkit display primitives are integrated into Qt Designer - simplifying
the task of enhancing existing applications or writing new modules. The next steps
in this project are to configure additional laptop systems for additional users
while developing logical add-ons to the software. Ultimately, this technology
will be applied to 3D data volumes and deployed in other regions.
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