10 July 1996
Wes Bethel
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Partners: BP Exploration, Landmark Graphics (Western Atlas Software)

Project: Advanced Visualization and Virtual Reality for 
	Reservoir Engineering

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One goal of this industry-lab collaboration is commercially-available 
is software which performs visualization of "flux".  Flux refers to the
data computed by multi-phase flow simulation codes.  Another goal the
deployment of low-cost Virtual Reality technology into mainstream 
visualization and computing environments.  The project commenced
in early 1995 and is scheduled for completion in early Fall, 1996.

Earlier this year, Western Atlas announced the commercial released of
software containing visualization features produced as part of this
collaboration.  Reservoir engineers now have a commercially-supported
tool for creating visual representations of complex flux data.  Later
releases of this software will include additional visualization techniques,
also developed as part of this project.

In the laboratory, Virtual Reality technology has been interfaced to numerous
visualiztion and computing algorithms.  These will be integrated into the 
commercial later this year by one of the industrial partners.  A technical
paper was presented in June 1996 at the conference titled "Virtual Reality
in the Geosciences" held in Halden, Norway.  This paper contains in-depth
technical details of integrating Virtual Reality input devices into the
desktop workstation environment and the software coupling between the
VR hardware and numerous computational and visualization processes.

This project represents a successful collaboration between a national
Laboratory and industry.  The success stems from the fact that expertise
from both environments is brought to bear on what is
essentially a multidisciplinary problem involving reservoir and software
engineering.