The Visual Wavefield Project

We are pioneering a new field called Perceptive interpretation. Perceptive Interpretation is the science, technology and practice of working with seismic in its natural analog state. It is based upon two entirely new seismic disciplines. Wavefield Reconstruction is the science and technology of reconstructing an analog seismic wavefield. It is base... d upon our knowledge of what seismic is and the processes that go into acquiring and processing it. Wavefield Visualization is the science, technology and practice of perceiving the reconstructed wavefield. It is based upon our extensive theoretical knowledge of the human visual processing system and how we communicate through it. We developed variable density displays in 1978 only to display instantaneous seismic attributes. Interpreters refused to use them for seismic until they were forced to when we started interpreting on computer monitors. They are purely chromatic and we use them today anytime amplitude is important. Humans may be visual creatures but that doesnt mean we have good color vision. We may have better color perceptions than other mammals but our ability to discriminate color variations does not come close to that of birds, reptiles or even Devonian Fish. We dont even see color directly. The colors you are looking at now never exist as color coded signals anywhere in the visual cortex. We only interpret color by contrast, those interpretations being degraded by our losing two of the original four color receptor genes during our long dark Cretaceous night. Color, in the natural world, is important to primates, but only for the crude purposes of determining the ripeness of fruit or the succulence of leaves. Beyond that and its aesthetically pleasing nature, it means little to us. Variable Density Displays mean even less because they are processed entirely by our secondary chromatic neural circuit and they cannot, therefore, produce perceptions at all. Both theoretically and practically, variable density displays are the most ineffective communication ...Read More