Hyercube viewer: New displays and new data-types

Introduction

Seismic viewing tools can be broken into two categories: batch viewing programs and interactive viewers. SEP has a long history of both program types. Static viewing programs can produce line graphs, wiggle traces, hidden line plots, contours, and raster images. These programs, in combination with utility programs that allow windowing and transposing of arrays offer the ability to create effective static graphics. For viewing and understanding multi-dimensional volumes, these tools are not as useful.

A series of SEP's interactive viewers (Ottolini, 1983,1988; Clapp, 2001; Ottolini, 1982; Chen and Clapp, 2006; Ottolini, 1990) have also been developed at SEP. These viewers are more effective in viewing multi-dimensional volumes but have been limited in three key ways. The first shortcoming is their inability to produce high quality graphics and reproduce a given view of a dataset. Second, they were restricted to viewing a single (later a few) datasets that had to be identical in size and fit in memory. Finally, they only display data in raster format. Clapp et al. (2008) made an initial attempt in addressing the first shortcoming by recording, and allowing, replaying of mouse and keyboard actions.

In this paper we attempt to address the viewer's dataset and display limitations. We describe changes to the way the program interacts with datasets. These changes allow the viewer to handle datasets with different sampling and different number of dimensions, and even operate in an out-of-core mode. We show the new display options that allow the user to view the data as contour and wiggle plots. Finally we describe additional changes in the UI to the viewer and briefly discuss what might be added in the future.

Hyercube viewer: New displays and new data-types