Designing Snakey: A Tangible User Interface Supporting Well Path Planning

Abstract

Abstract. We present our ongoing design of Snakey, a tangible user interface (TUI) dedicated to the field of reservoir geosciences and engineering. Our design of Snakey emphasizes intuitive manipulation and interaction with 3D curves, common to underground well path exploration and planning. Snakey is not designed to replace the traditional CAD reservoir well path planning tools, but rather to augment them with tangible and collaborative interaction, facilitating spatial exploration during the multi-stage planning processes involved in well path design. Our short paper presents design goals and prototyping solutions relating to Snakey's physicality, sensing technology, input/output mapping, and multi-modal feedback, as well as our findings from a preliminary evaluation of the latest Snakey prototype in a design critique session by experienced reservoir engineers.

ReservoirBench: An Interactive Educational Reservoir Engineering Workbench

“…The benefit of having an associative and spatial system can help externalize traditional digital representations and present a physical view that people are familiar with [11] and is fundamental to geological entities [10]. Having working knowledge of oil and gas software tools the domain expert mentioned that practical learning with commercial software alone is rather difficult, specifically for non-domain audiences, since the software is designed for experts and not novices.…”

“…Within the realm of geology and reservoir engineering, TUI's [7,10,15], tabletop interfaces [19,20] and a web-based interface [4] have been previously introduced. However, the focus in these instances of research has mainly been on data exploration.…”

“…However, the focus in these instances of research has mainly been on data exploration. For instance, Snakey [10] is a TUI designed exclusively for expert users engaged in the particular task of well design in reservoir engineering. It is not an educational toolkit and does not attempt to address the breadth of essential reservoir modeling concepts that ReservoirBench is addressing.…”

“…However, it is important to note that accurate design of horizontal wells is rather difficult using the 3Doodler TM due to gravity effect. In contrast to Snakey's [10] rigid and difficult to manipulate interface that is built from camera tripods, both the 3Doodler and the pipe cleaner afford further flexibility for free-form and iterative well design.…”

“…Scaling is also a challenge. While part of the scaling issue can be mitigated by the use of digital representations, we need to be careful in our design considerations to ensure that the level of physical-digital coupling is not reduced to the point of creating disconnects in interaction behavior (a noted limitation of Snakey [10]). Alternatively, an advantage of interfaces such as ours is that the low-cost prototype production will allow users to quickly modify the design of the system.…”