KEYWORDS: Collaborative Environments, Virtual Reality, User Interface, Petroleum Industry.

ABSTRACT

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) as large display systems, CAVEs and so on, tend to become noticeable as the new workflow paradigm at petroleum industry. The applications in CVE are rapidly expanding within the companies introducing fundamental innovations in the productive processes and in the performance of its business. Throughout your utilization the professional language barriers have been broken, allowing developers to share and learn from each other, across disciplinary boundaries. So, multidisciplinary synergetic teams integrated by geologists, geophysicists, engineers and project managers can now check different interpretation and reach quickly a consensus on the most convenient applicable model in each case. But, the traditional computer interface - the keyboard, mouse and monitor - force us to work within tight, unnatural, two-dimensional constraints. For humans the natural world is a 3D environment. A CVE with anthropomorphic characteristics takes advantage of this fact. By allowing the user to walk around the middle of the data and interact with them in the manner as in which humans interact with 3D objects every day. There are important components to be considered in an anthropomorphic interface, mainly the display projection and the user control aspects. With the research improvements and developments of new input devices and its commercial production several advanced concepts for human-machine interaction could be developed and included in the CVE. The main objective this work is improves the discussion process about the user interaction in CVE at petroleum industry. It intended to show the developments in display projection, non-conventional devices as force-feedback devices, tactile gloves, tracker systems; that allows that the user to control the stereoscopic display parameters and feel and touch objects in a virtual three-dimensional worlds does the interface to close match the human interface.

BIOGRAPHY

Carlos Luiz N. dos Santos was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a senior researcher of Virtual Reality Application Group (GRVa) and Collaborating Professor at the Alberto Luiz Coimbra Institute of Graduate School and Research in Engineering (COPPE) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

He received a BA in mathematics from State University of Rio de Janeiro in 1988 and the MSc in civil engineering at the COPPE/UFRJ in 1991. In 2001, he finished his DSc thesis at the COPPE/UFRJ in VR technology applied to Offshore Engineering. His research interests include VR, scientific visualization, and human-computer interfaces.

Nowadays, he is doing his post-doctoral at ISIMA (Institut Supérieur d'Informatique et Modelisation and leurs Aplications) at Université Blaise Pascal - Clermont-Ferrand, France.