Mining the future with virtual reality
The mineral exploration field is ripe for a digital disruption, according to industry leaders
Telling the world where to find your gold may seem anathema to many old-school prospectors, but that’s exactly what Integra Gold chair George Salamis told a packed room of geologists, prospectors and investors to do. After all, he’s done it himself. Salamis spoke at the 2017 Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference in Toronto this week. The conference brings together prospectors, mining companies, industry leaders and potential investors every year with an eye to new trends and developments in the mineral exploration world.
In 2015 Integra Gold open-sourced the data on its Lamaque project in Val-d’Or, Que. The project has nearly 900,000 ounces of high-grade gold indicated and another one million ounces inferred across six deposits.
As payoff for opening up data, Integra got an artificially intelligent virtual reality model of its resources. As more data is collected and plowed into the model, the database learns from itself and creates increasingly accurate new models of the underground gold deposits.
It’s all part of a much-needed digital revolution in mining, Salamis said, a disruption that many other industries are already in.
The mineral exploration industry is “one of the most backward-thinking industries on the planet” when it comes to digital innovation Salamis said.
The oil and gas industry is already about a decade ahead of mineral exploration, he said, and the mentality of Yosemite Sam jealously guarding his claim data is holding the industry back.
“It’s the idea that ‘we’ve been doing it this way for 50 years, so why change,’ ” Salamis said.
Integra Gold succeeded, Salamis said, by creating a $1-million contest that sought the best proposal on how to use its data. It put a call out not just to geoscientists but to tech developers, game designers, even medical researchers.
The contest received 1,000 submissions from 65 countries. Quebec-based SGS Geostat took the $500,000 top prize, with a program that combined artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics and virtual reality to map the Lamaque resources below ground in an interactive 3D space.
That map will help the company go after high-value drilling targets on the Val-d’Or property more accurately than traditional methods, Salamis said.
That kind of innovative thinking is exactly what the industry desperately needs, Deloitte mining consultant Andrew Swart said.
Mining today is like banking in the ’90s, Swart said.
“You couldn’t access anything online, you had to go into a physical bank, you had to do a lot of your transactions manually.”
Today, you can do pretty much everything from your smartphone.
“The revolution that hit banking over the course of a decade is pretty much the same transition that mining is going through right now,” Swart said.
Many mines around the world are still highly labour-intensive projects, both in terms of physical ore extraction but also when it comes to data collection and analysis.
The exponential growth of computing power means that mines could stick sensors on pretty much everything from haul trucks to worker uniforms, tracking the data centrally and then open-sourcing it to let the tech world help find efficiency improvements and solve problems.
“Ideally, you’d love to be able to run a mine where you have real-time data, where you know how much is being produced, where it’s being produced, how individual sub-processes in your mine are actually performing,” Swart said.
One day mines will be able to take advantage of technology like augmented reality, where workers can see things like real-time air quality data displayed above their heads or 3D blasting schematics superimposed onto the walls they’re drilling to help keep them on target.
That’s the future that MetaVRse cofounder Julie Smithson sees. Her company creates virtual reality simulators to help better train heavy industry workers in jobs where special awareness and safety are key. It also designs programs for augmented reality glasses — like Google Glass on steroids — that can stream a wealth of info right into your field of view.
“We’re all about improving safety and training, first and foremost,” Smithson explains as she demonstrates the AR headset.
On the trade show floor Smithson’s wasn’t the only company with new and disruptive technologies on display.
There were companies such as senseFly, which builds drones that can be used for automated aerial or even underground mapping, photography and surveying.
“Mining and surveying go hand in hand,” said senseFly engineer Briton Voorhees.
Our drones, “can replace the guy walking all the way around the rim of an open pit mine,” doing in a day what a survey team could take a week to accomplish, Voorhees said.
While these kind of “point solutions” are good, Swart said that a larger paradigm shift in thinking still needs to occur.
“It’s still very disconnected right now,” he said. A recent Deloitte report Swart co-authored on digital innovation in mining echoes his words.
“Miners cannot afford to get caught up in the widgets and the toys. Instead, they need to embed digital thinking, processes and structures into the entire organization.”