EnvironRC: Integrating Mobile Communication and Collaboration to Offshore Engineering Virtual Reality Applications

Offshore Engineering visualization applications are, in most cases, very complex and should display a lot of data coming from very computational intensive numerical simulations. To help analyze and better visualize the results, 3D visualization can be used in conjunction with a VR environment. The main idea for this work began as we realized two different demands that engineering applications had when running on VR setups: firstly, a demand for visualization support in the form of better navigation and better data analysis capabilities. Secondly, a demand for collaboration, due to the difficulties of coordinating a team with one member using VR. To meet these demands, we developed a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) capable of adding external communications to any application. Using the added communications, we built an external collaboration layer. We study the architecture of our solution and how it could be implemented for any application. Furthermore, we study the impact of our solution when running an Offshore Engineering application on VR setups with the support of mobile devices. Such devices can be used to help navigate the virtual world or be used as a second screen, helping visualize and manipulate large sets of data in the form of tables or graphs. As our test application, we used Environ, which is a VR application for visualization of 3D models and simulations.