A Decade of Increased Oil Recovery in Virtual Reality

Finding oil is always a difficult and expensive task, and moving exploration and production (E&P) offshore quickly drives those costs sky-high. Because most easy oil has already been found, any new discoveries are often subtle and relatively small. Once a company does find a reservoir, deciding where and how to drill to maximize production - and thus return of investment - is a major task. The wrong approach or small inaccuracies can easily ruin an entire reservoir´s ROI. Clearly, we need good tools to complete these difficult E&P tasks. In 1992, the University of Chicago´s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) introduced the CAVE, a room-sized, multiperson projector-based immersive VR environment. CAVE laid the foundation for a new paradigm: using VR for petroleum E&P. The HydroVR project both changed work processes and increased revenue for petroleum E&P in general. In this paper, we describe the project´s major application milestones and summarize how and why the project has sustained its extensive activity over the past 10 years.