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Microsoft Azure + INTViewer

Yesterday, I was invited to the Microsoft offices in Houston to install a demo of INTViewer. Microsoft advocates for solutions that are hosted on the cloud, and I found that INTViewer fits this model well.

The cloud is not just a set of computing resources hosting web based-applications. Microsoft Azure can also be used to host what we know today as desktop PCs. Constant availability and unlimited storage are just two of the numerous advantages of hosting your PC on the cloud.

To access our “PC in the cloud,” you only need a lightweight appliance hooked to a keyboard, a mouse and a monitor. An example of such appliance is the “Teradici Zero Client.” What’s different between a classic “Remote Desktop Solution” and Teradici’s solution is how rendering is implemented. Network latency can get in the way of the user experience if not done right. Teradici’s network protocol makes remote interaction seamless. This is important for INTViewer: At its core, INTViewer is a visualization application. Users typically have several large monitors to work with their data, which means a lot of pixels to transport.

A key to application performance is to keep your data and your visualization software close to each other. Once you put your geoscience data in Microsoft Azure, INTViewer allows instant visualization of that data. The reason why INTViewer is a good fit for that setup is that it’s a relatively lightweight application. Unlike large interpretation software, you typically only need 1 to 4 GB of memory to run. And it’s a snap to install.

It’s quite a leap to decide to move terabytes of data to Microsoft Azure, and INTViewer is only one factor to that decision. However, there is one immediate use case for Microsoft Azure and INTViewer: INTViewer is a great tool for presentations. The slideshow plugin allows businesses to prepare presentations, each slide showing a particular aspect of a survey. I mocked up in a few minutes a presentation of the well-known Alwyn dataset. This presentation included visualization of a seismic survey and how it relates with wells and the reservoir model. For good measure, I added a spectrum analysis and a numerical view of log curves. The entire data underlying that presentation was only 10GB, easy to copy to Microsoft’s cloud at a moment’s notice.

This opens a new way to use INTViewer. Some of our customers use laptops to showcase acquisition data to potential clients. With a cloud-based solution, the burden of copying the data to each laptop disappears — you only need to copy it once to the cloud.

I was particularly proud of how well the slideshow plugin performed. Navigating through Alwyn became as simple as flipping through Powerpoint slides. But unlike a static presentation, attendees can interact with the data on demand. If a problematic data point is identified, it is easy to zoom, perform a live QA of that data, answer questions, and then move on to the next topic.

Check back soon for more new features and tips on how to use INTViewer or contact us for a demo of INTViewer in the cloud.


Simple Usability Features for Desktop Applications

My day-to-day workstation is a Windows PC. It has a good GPU, but otherwise, it’s a fairly normal computer. I use NetBeans IDE all the time. I also use Microsoft Word and Excel, but I find that there is still room to improve: The user interface is still overly driven by the file system. I constantly switch between applications, often repeating the same steps to point each application to where my files might be, either in My Documents, Downloads, Data, or Desktop.

INTViewer is an application that is very file-driven. Once you launch INTViewer, most likely your next interaction will be to designate the location on disk of a file to load, whether that file is a seismic dataset, an INTViewer session, or a slideshow. Likewise, as you save renderings to image files, or as you export sample values to Excel, you will need to designate a location on disk for your output.

Microsoft Windows has a standard dialog to choose and save files, but this is not an optimal way to navigate your file system from within your application because this dialog hides your content while you are choosing a path on disk. INTViewer addresses this by offering to open the directory where you just saved a file.
 

The notification that appears in INTViewer once you save a session file.
 
The idea is to make the application aware of the user workflow, anticipate it, and facilitate it. If you save a session file, your next step might be to share it with others. How many times have you saved a file and wondered the next second where you just saved it? Opening the directory where this file resides makes this next task easier. INTViewer’s non-blocking notification is not intrusive: users can ignore it, and there’s no “cancel” button to press to shoo a pesky dialog away.

(I often wish Notepad had this feature. In fact, I wish ALL desktop applications had this feature. It’s really simple to implement and would make my day-to-day tasks that much easier.)

One benefit that desktop applications have over web applications is productivity. A power user often loads files from the same directories. As a result, the path of these directories is well-known. This is especially true for Linux users. Why not facilitate the entry of these paths? Here is an example of field where a file path needs to be entered.

For power users, the “choose” button should only be a fallback. Otherwise, it interrupts the flow. Typing the path directly would be a better option if only it were easier. The Python terminal has no choose button, so when we designed the autocompletion of Python scripts, we made it possible for users to enter a path interactively: just type Control+Space on your keyboard. With that, the file system becomes accessible at your fingertips, without a file chooser.
 

INTViewer Python scripting terminal
 

This is a simple feature, but very useful in this scripting context. Once we added it, we realized it would be quite simple to reuse in the context of path fields. Path fields in INTViewer 5.2 have the same contextual capabilities as the Python terminal.

Now that both of these features are in place, I use them all the time. In fact, I save so much time (and headache), I wish all of my other desktop applications worked this way.

Check back soon for more new features and tips on how to use INTViewer or contact us for a demo.


Introducing the Normalization Widget

The release of INTViewer 5.2 is just around the corner. With it, there are around 100 new features and improvements. As a quick preview, I’d like to focus on one of them, a favorite of mine, the Normalization widget.

The Normalization widget is part of the new “Auxiliary Widget” feature set. If you are familiar with INTViewer, you have probably used the Auxiliary Graph before to inspect variations of amplitudes along horizons or just seismic header values. INTViewer 5.2 generalizes the concept of an area located right above a XSection window. Not only is this area now resizable, but it can also show multiple tools.

The Normalization widget is one of these tools. It shows graphically how your current selection relates to the minimum and maximum amplitudes of the entire dataset. There are several normalization options in INTViewer: RMS, Maximum, Limits, etc. Until now, there wasn’t a graphical way to decide which option works best for your data. The widget’s plot shows the minimum and maximum of each trace displayed. If you picked the RMS option, the RMS of your dataset is shown as a horizontal line, and the RMS of each trace is displayed as a vertical line.

The Limits normalization type is often used when you perform a rapid QA of your data. Some customers even make Limits the default normalization type. The Limits normalization requires the entry of a minimum and maximum. The Normalization widget makes the selection of this range graphical and interactive. You no longer have to enter arbitrary values blindly. Just drag the minimum and maximum curtains in the widget and your visualization will update automatically.

As part of the preparation for the INTViewer 5.2 release, we worked with a few professors at Texas A&M and found that the Normalization widget is a great tool for teaching the different types of normalization. All seismic packages have nearly identical normalization capabilities. INTViewer is the only application of its kind providing such an effective way to make an informed decision about which normalization type to pick.

INTViewer 5.2 is a major release with many new features deserving a closer look. One of our next posts will talk about how developers can easily add their own auxiliary widget.