‘Tron’ not ‘The Matrix’ – towards visual digital twins for geoscience and beyond

‘Tron’ not ‘The Matrix’ –towards visual digital twins for geoscience and beyond

Dr Steven Micklethwaite, Program Leader - Complex Orebodies Principal Research Fellow - Geology, The University of Queensland | Matthew Greenwood, Manager Regional Compilations, Geological Survey of Queensland | Ethan Vellacott, Solutions Delivery Manager, Euclideon Ltd

The last few years have seen a buzz around Industry 4.0, internet-of things (IoT), artificial intelligence, blockchain technology and digital twins. Often this comes with a sense of a world that’s changing beyond our skill base and control. There is, no doubt, significant opportunity in the new technologies that could be game-changers.

The challenge, however, is how to harness this opportunity well. It is important to find pathways to achieve genuine business transformation and not leave livelihoods behind.

Two recent(-ish) movies that capture this zeitgeist are The Matrix and Tron: Legacy.

In The Matrix, Neo, the main protagonist, discovers a reality-bending world beyond the world he thought he lived in. Despite developing superhuman powers, he is little more than a human snared by groupthink and swept along in a predetermined story in a computer-generated world.

In contrast, Tron similarly portrays an unexpected virtual reality, but one where the protagonists maintain control in a thrilling adventure with human connection.

Building data to stimulate exploration

What does this have to do with the mining sector? Over the last few decades, Queensland and the Australian Commonwealth have been collecting enormous volumes of data for the minerals industry and serving it up, in digital formats, for free (otherwise known as pre-competitive data). This has helped contribute to the billions of dollars in jobs and investment in the State.

In addition, the Department of Resources, Queensland, has a data modernisation program, in line with the QRIDP, which is intended to set up industry for future success by harvesting exploration data and making it public after a period of confidentiality, to help stimulate further exploration in the state. It has made Queensland an attractive destination, not just for the junior sector but also for majors such as Anglo American and Rio Tinto.

Managing massive data streams

However, such massive data presents a challenge. How do industry and the public make sense of it? How do we search for and find the data easily and efficiently in one location before investing time in downloading it for our own business needs?

And how do we avoid frustrating computing and software limitations in viewing and processing such vast amounts of data?

Fortunately, the Department of Resources' vision for data modernisation stretches far beyond just collecting large amounts of new data. They seek to unlock future mineral supply by providing a step-change in the industry’s ability to make rapid and cost-effective decisions from the State’s vast 3D spatial information.

As such, it involves a plan that also incorporates the development of data-driven discovery tools, such as digital twins, and making them accessible to all levels of the sector – whether juniors with low levels of investment and limited infrastructure, or majors with significantly more capacity to absorb and analyse data.

This vision is being fulfilled by a collaboration between the Sustainable Minerals Institute (SMI) at The University of Queensland and the Brisbane-based 3D data technology company Euclideon. Euclideon originated in the gaming sector but for several years now has been expanding its expertise to create 3D Spatial Information Decision-Making tools, involving large amounts of storage in the cloud and a unique visualisation environment, known as udStream.

Digital twin collaboration for understandable visualisation at any scale

At SMI we have been working closely with Euclideon to adapt udStream and build a digital twin of all available geoscience data from the NW Minerals Province of Queensland.

One of the unique aspects of this twin is the ability to visualise most data sets as “point clouds”, be they maps, 3D geological surfaces, seismic datasets or whatever. If you were to zoom in at very high resolution to any one of these data types, you would find they are composed of extremely dense, individual, coloured points.

Such an approach avoids the need for tiling of data and leads to a seamless experience, where you can zoom into an object that may be microns in scale, such as a CT scan of some drill core, then zoom out to inspect regional geophysics thousands of kilometres wide. Other techniques for viewing large amounts of data tend to struggle across such vastly different scales.

The 'Digital Earth Model'

Digital twins can be thought of as counterpart digital representations of a real-world system. In this case, the purpose is to build a real-time, continually updating ‘Digital Earth Model’ that can be used to find, query, filter, interpret and download data. As new geoscience data is made available by the Department, it is automatically served up in the visual environment.

We seek to adapt Euclideon’s udStream 3D visualisation solution, to seamlessly absorb and display geoscience data from the microscopic scale to the regional. The intent is for industry to be able to access all relevant data for a region and have the best possible chance of making good exploration and resource management decisions.

At present, the collaboration between SMI, Euclideon and the Department of Resources has run for one year and has led to a proof-of-concept Digital Earth Model, incorporating geoscience data from the Northwest Minerals Province.

Nonetheless, the nature of the visualisation environment means it is suitable to incorporate data for the whole of the State, and it is interoperable.

The potential of powerful ‘shared truth’ across the state

The latter strength is important for potential future expansion of the project to visualise data from other sectors of government (e.g., water management, environmental, agricultural and infrastructure sectors). If realised, it will allow the innovation to move towards a more powerful digital twin, where different stakeholders will be able to experience a shared source of truth and access to data critical to their day-to-day jobs.

The Open Data portal and GeoResGlobe

In the coming year, the initiative will build on the momentum created since 2019 with the release of the Geological Survey of Queensland’s Open Data Portal and the online tool, GeoResGlobe, which has been used to view Queensland's mining and exploration data, permits and assessment of mineral potential in Queensland.

Working closely with the Department of Resources and Esri Australia, we will be integrating ‘Digital Earth’ into the existing GeoResGlobe online interface, so that we can collectively render the State’s minerals data as 3D textured objects within GeoResGlobe.

In this way, we hope to deliver an earlystage digital twin for everyone, that will be accessible online from most devices – one where the industry is in control and can use the data to accelerate its workflow, rather than be carried along Matrix-style on a wave of new technology. 