Game-like Interface to GIS data infrastructure

UG1 copy  UG2 copy

The single-player discovery game, Where Should the Pipeline Go?, where the farmer and landman negotiate the route of the gathering pipeline introduces a range of salient issues–impacts on wetlands, on productive farmland and forest, and on streams–and the trade-offs against cost, foregone fishing or bird-watching.  It does not, however, deal with the implications that arise from where gas facilities are located.

A useful first step would be to be able to experiment with locating gas wells and pipelines on the landscape and assess the impacts of those locations on forest cover etc.

A second prototype game, the Well and Pipeline Placement Simulator (WPPS), is built on the principles of a multi-user interactive game where users can freely move through a realistic world and locate facilities at will (to run WPPS requires downloading the Unity® plug-in.)  This game is linked to the previous one.  When users select their chosen pipeline routing and exit the game their choice is posted to a computer server.

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When the user logs on to WPPS, they are asked to input a user name which retrieves the game choice from the server and opens the game in a 3D model of the felt-board landscape showing the choice the player selected in the previous game, in this case the inadvisable route under the wetland (see images at top of this page.)  Help functions are available via ? at the lower left of the display.  At present navigation is rudimentary, and landscape actions are confined to the location of well pads and pipelines.  However, while the landscape in this model is simulated to match the conditions on the felt-board, the structure is capable of modeling any landscape based on standard topographical data (e.g., USGeological Survey Digital Elevation Models.)  Similarly, forest cover as shown in the model can be imported from standard Geographical Information System platforms (e.g. ESRI ArcGIS.)

The images below show the ability to navigate the environment, locate new wells and pipelines and show the effects of the resulting pipeline right-of-ways on forest cover, and for pre-existing wells with current production data to query and retrieve that data direct from Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Oil and Gas Reports.  Although in their early stages of development, these tools demonstrate the benefits for citizens of learning and experimenting with their own ideas about gas development in a risk-free environment where exploration is unbounded, mistakes can be rectified and basic concepts can be explored at whatever pace is appropriate, and away from the pressure of other points-of-view.

UG5 copy  UG8 copyUG10  UG9

Well and Pipeline Placement Simulator (to run WPPS requires downloading the Unity® plug-in.)