Beneath the Waves and Beyond the Screen: Visualising Subsea Survey Data in Three Dimensions

High-resolution subsea survey data offers a new ability to explore difficult or hazardous environments, and using multi-beam sonar, provides three-dimensional bathymetric data for visualisation. However, this data represents three-dimensional structures and locations that exist in physical space, and yet we commonly limit ourselves to viewing them in a static and two-dimensional screen-based format. Are we getting the most out of this data? Are computers, the very devices that have enabled us to “see” these objects, limiting our ability to interact with and interrogate the rich data being gathered? The author has conducted a series of workshops focused on evaluating the ‘data lifecycle’, in an attempt to improve our understanding of the communicative value of different visualisation techniques. By exploring methods of visualising subsea survey data in new, interesting, and challenging ways we can improve our understanding of the underlying data, challenge our preconceived ideas on what it might be telling us, and encourage interactivity in ways that simply wasn’t possible before.