Looking deep inside a mine with virtual-reality software

In the late 1990s, a visualization revolution began radically reconfiguring how many professionals did their jobs. Architects, car designers, and oil and gas engineers all started turning to three-dimensional computer representations to help them better understand what they were creating or exploring.

But not hardrock mine engineers and mine owners. No, they still sketched out in two-dimensional blueprint format where they were going to sink shafts to mine the ore. If they wanted to more visually express a mine's complex underground architecture, they often coloured in sections with well-sharpened Faber-Castell pencils.

Then Ontario visionaries arrived on the scene. "We looked at what was happening in computer simulations in the automobile and architecture and oil and gas industries and said to ourselves, 'Geez, that is what the mining industry needs,'" says Peter Kaiser, former president of MIRARCO.

And where has the non-profit corporation's original insightful "geez" taken it and the mining world today?

To begin with, the organization has become an acknowledged world leader in creating software tools that allow mines and ore bodies to be depicted in virtual-reality 3-D representations. For anyone unfamiliar with it, VR is the immersive advanced technology video game manufacturers use to make players' bodies feel as if they are not so much playing a game as playing in a game.

Today, various mines in Canada, the U.S., Australia and, more recently, China use MIRARCO-developed technology to help answer questions as to how various changes in the mine might affect the mine's operation as a whole. Something as simple as deciding where a shaft should go turns into complexity incarnate as access, cost and stability issues must all be juggled at once.

VR's interactive nature gives mine owners and operators what might be called a "body feel" for the difficulties and various ways of resolving them. It is a process that Kaiser has poetically characterized as: Dream it; see it; solve it.

MIRARCO has also collaborated with small exploration and mining companies trying to attract the interest of investors. The MIRARCO displays, which are viewed through 3-D glasses, not only graphically represent ore bodies to be developed but give investors another "body feel" for how these deposits will be mined.

But probably its most innovative contributions have been in what Andrew Dasys, MIRARCO's vice-president, calls "the 5-D approach." This models how the mine is affected over time (the fourth D) by some other complex, constantly changing element (the fifth D).

Perhaps the most dramatic fifth D today is how ore prices can alter the course of mining. "Cost factors don't change in civil engineering applications, but mining constantly has to consider the fluctuating commodities markets. When gold is $270 an ounce, a lot of properties aren't worth mining; but when it hits $900, they become profitable," says Dasys.

MIRARCO has come up with a variety of visualization methods to let companies see how changing prices could reconfigure what gets mined and, equally important, when it gets mined. Kaiser points out that in the past mines operated on the principle that getting something out of the ground quickly and cheaply was mining's fundamental business plan.

"When ore prices are high, slower and more expensive mining may be ultimately more profitable," says Kaiser.

But there is an interesting political context for MIRARCO's success. Kaiser points out that federal government funding for mining research was slashed in the 1990s. In an era when computer-based technology was turning a pick-and-shovel industry into a high-tech one, the Province's response - one that consecutive governments all agreed on - was, says Kaiser, "We are not going to fall behind in this critical area. If the federal government won't, then we will invest in mining research."

With MIRARCO's success, that decision seems today less like another "geez" and more like an enormous "whew."