Digital Disruption in Mining and Mineral Exploration
In a recent article, the Mineral Exploration industry is said to be moving towards the use of Augmented and Virtual Reality.
The article states that 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 1 million ounces inferred. As payoff for opening up its 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.
George Salamis Chairman of Integra Gold has said that this technology is a much-needed digital revolution in mining since he felt that the mineral exploration industry is not normally known for its digital innovation.
He also commented: “The oil and gas industry is already about a decade ahead of mineral exploration… by creating $1-million contest that sought the best proposal for how to use data it put a call out not just to geoscientists but to tech developers, game designers and even medical researchers.”
In this year’s conference of Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, which was held in Toronto this week, Quebec-based SGS Geostat took first place winning a $500,000 top prize with a program combining artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics and Virtual Reality which will map the Lamaque resources below ground in an interactive 3D space. The article says that this map will help the company go after high value drilling targets on the Val-d’Or property more accurately than traditional methods.
According to the article the exponential growth of computing power means that mines could now 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.