Cutting-edge technology is unveiling countless possibilities for the future of the forestry industry.
University of South Australia Interactive and Virtual Environments Lab PhD student Spencer O’Keeffe explores the application of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for exploring environmental science.
The technology will allow people in the forestry industry to visualise scenarios and put themselves in a virtual world, which can be applied to real life.
“It is mainly about enhancing forestry operations, so being able to get better data, and being able to do better analytics means the different forestry operations would be able to run more efficiently, more safely,” Mr O’Keeffe said.
“There may be other applications for immersive analytics throughout the region, there is a lot of forestry here so the tools become viable, and it will get taken up a lot around here.
“Any sort of industry that would be enhanced by having more specific data has the potential.
“Now these datasets are becoming more readily available and the tools to analyse them are becoming easier to access and more affordable as well, it is actually becoming feasible to do this kind of analysis.
“Having better data and having more insights means you will be more effective and more efficient in the long run.
“There are different products on the horizon with different companies, there are a couple of different industry partnered projects in my lab, so it will be interesting to see how everything comes.”
UniSA Mount Gambier General Manager of Forest Research Jim O’Hehir said the technology could also be used to provide training in machinery such as harvesters.
“To be able to train a person to use a harvester, it is not like putting someone in a car, you cannot have a spare a state-of-the-art harvester worth a million dollars for someone to practice on, because that is not realistic, so these sorts of technologies provide opportunities to provide training,” he said.
Dr O’Hehir said the technology would also be great for optimal resource use by improving the precision of estimates of what resources were out there and where they were.
“Because we are so short of structural timber in Australia, we only produce about 70% to 75% of what we actually use in construction, so there is quite a large opportunity to make up that gap if you can better utilise what you have already got,” he said.
Mr O’Keeffe said the environmental aspects of the technology were not specific to forestry and could be applied to other areas.
“Being able to do tree analysis has benefits for ecological surveys and nature preservation,” he said.
“Being able to take snapshots in time of an area that you can later step back through is useful both in taking a sample, running analyses and being able to share that with another person. “There are wetlands and water projects that are interested in things like water simulations.”
Mr O’Keeffe and Dr O’Hehir said the VR/AR technology could also be beneficial for tourism, as it could virtually transport people to the region and encourage them to visit in person.
Mr O’Keeffe said he was interested in getting involved with VR/AR technology from the get-go.
“When I first got my hands on a headset as part of my honours degree to toy around with setting up a virtual aspect, it was really, really apparent as a teaching tool the capacities are absolutely insane,” he said.
“Being able to put someone in an environment to show them something that might be invisible to the human eye, might be completely unsafe for a human to be near or might only happen once in a million years and let them interact with it and do it themselves, it was amazing honestly.
“I immediately saw there was so much more science that you could do, there are so many hidden relationships in the world that you could find if you could look at them with an extra dimension, with an extra bit of depth and an extra perspective.
“There are things that just make so much more sense in 3D.”
