This paper shows application results of virtual reality (VR) techniques for construction of a sea floor layout prototype design in petrolium fields. The use of VR allows the integration and interaction (visualization, navigation and manipulation) with massive database in an unique graphic model which represents the real situation, a problem until now without a satisfactory 3D solution.
Brazil is a Country endowed with large potential reserves, like, gold, iron ore, petroleum, … PETROBRAS has accomplished new findings of petroleum natural deposits in brazilian soil, almost all of them were found in maritime continental platform. When the first exploitation (exploration on economic form) projects arised, named OFFSHORE Project1 (Ferrante, A. J., Ebecken, N. F. F., Lima and E. C. Prates, 1977), the challenge frontiers restricting to distances between the sea bottom and the sea surface were not greater than 160 meters. At the present, the challenge is the same, but the still water level, now goes to the frontier of 3.000 meters of deepness (deep waters). Due to the physical nature of this project, the greater the still water level, the higher is the action of maritimes agents (current, tide, soil, …), what requests more volumes of information, as oceanographic, geological, stress, relieve, equipment locations (ships, wells, …). Besides, more precision is fundamental when working with this limits of depth, whereas the regular investment of this nature stays around millions of dollars. The safety item also appear important, because one project with this largeness improperly realized can provoke environmental accidents of great proportions "… One image values much more than a thousand words" says the famous chinese proverb and the Virtual Reality (VR) reflects exactly the core of this question, showing graphically and in a intuitive way large amounts of complex data.
