ARCO and immersive environments, Part 1: The first two generations

ARCO began its efforts in 3-D visualization in 1989 using a Silicon Graphics (SGI) Personal IRIS 4D/25 deskside workstation and an eight-processor SGI Power Series workstation with VGX graphics. At the time, it was the most powerful workstation SGI had ever configured for any company in the world. Our work was first proposed as a natural extension of interactive 3-D seismic interpretation. Initial development included the ability to interactively display interpreted horizons, faults, and well paths in 3-D. These displays employed perspective, lighting, shading, obscuration, and motion parallax to convey the 3-D nature of the data to the interpreter.