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Interpretation of geological features in seismic data is a subjective process, relying on one's visual perception and experience built up over several years. Based on these human factors, financial decisions are made that may have serious consequences to a petroleum company. The aim of this study is to review the role of one key visual cue in this interpretative process: colour. Colour is a powerful cue that can have a significant impact on the interpretation of seismic data. However, compensation mechanisms within the human perceptual system can sometimes lead to unexpected visual effects, such as luminance sensitivity and simultaneous contrast, which have the potential to bias the interpretation of geoscientific information and therefore increase interpretation uncertainty and risk. Here we examine these visual effects, and present the findings of an experiment aiming to illustrate bias dependent on the use of colour. Both inter-and intra-operator differences were found in the manual delineation of a sedimentary geobody from seismic data. The results clearly suggest that measurements from seismic data based on manual delineation of imaged object boundaries can be associated with uncertainties that are usually unquantified.

Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. ABSTRACTThis paper describes our experience making a short stereoscopic movie visualizing the development of structure in the universe during the 13.7 billion years from the Big Bang to the present day. Aimed at a general audience for the Royal Society's 2005 Summer Science Exhibition, the movie illustrates how the latest cosmological theories based on dark matter and dark energy are capable of producing structures as complex as spiral galaxies and allows the viewer to directly compare observations from the real universe with theoretical results. 3D is an inherent feature of the cosmology data sets and stereoscopic visualization provides a natural way to present the images to the viewer, in addition to allowing researchers to visualize these vast, complex data sets.The presentation of the movie used passive, linearly polarized projection onto a 2m wide screen but it was also required to playback on a Sharp RD3D display and in anaglyph projection at venues without dedicated stereoscopic display equipment. Additionally lenticular prints were made from key images in the movie. We discuss the following technical challenges during the stereoscopic production process; 1) Controlling the depth presentation, 2) Editing the stereoscopic sequences, 3) Generating compressed movies in display specific formats.We conclude that the generation of high quality stereoscopic movie content using desktop tools and equipment is feasible. This does require careful quality control and manual intervention but we believe these overheads are worthwhile when presenting inherently 3D data as the result is significantly increased impact and better understanding of complex 3D scenes.

Volume attribute computation is an accepted part of mainstream interpretation workflows. Perhaps counter-intuitively, attribute generation is powerful because it creates data sets that show only a subset of the information available in the original seismic. By reducing the information content, it is easier to focus on those aspects of the seismic response that help differentiate particular aspects of the imaged geology. Seismic attributes often measure properties of the seismic signal and the trace-to-trace variation in seismic signal that have an opaque relationship to rock properties. Therefore, interpretation of such attributes is generally based on identification of geologically reasonable scenarios. This can be greatly facilitated by examining multiple attributes simultaneously in a spatially coregistered manner—to either increase the differentiation between features of interest or to the show the relationship between different types of seismic response. A powerful way to achieve this is the use of color-blending techniques (Henderson et al., 2007) (Figure 1). Color blending effectively illuminates the geology, but consequently creates a complex image in which the information is hard to access other than visually. Accurate extraction of the information perceived within a color blend is one of the interpretation challenges associated with the improvements in visualization technology.