Geological Modeling - Chevron
The TouchStone™ application touch-enables the creation and modification of boundary models of the sub-surface environment. As part of the oil exploration and production process, boundary models of important geophysical structures are created and refined based on seismic and other empirical oil field data. Like any CAD surface model, these boundary models need to be created, understood and refined. Prior to the development of TouchStone™, the creation, evaluation and modification of these 3D models had been hampered by the lack of touch feedback. Haptic interactions allow modelers to quickly and precisely designate the location of surfaces, feel as well as see their extent and shape, and directly modify them using their sense of touch. Like the creation and modification of physical models in everyday life, the creation and modification of digital models is difficult and impoverished without the sense of touch. The TouchStone application has added this crucial sense of touch to digital modeling.

Geophysical Structures in Touchstone
Within the context of the TouchStone effort, we have developed technology that allows the haptically enhanced creation, evaluation and modification of large polygonal models.  The polygonal algorithms are able to handle 1 million-polygon models in real time on PC-class computers. These capabilities are fundamental to any application that creates, uses or changes CAD models.