"Bring the mine to brilliant life" is a slogan of the Maptek-LlamaZOO collaborative push to enable miners to "interact with their spatial data in … a format typically only seen with high-end video games, but with actionable real-world data".

"Imagine viewing live data, such as trucks and shovels, loaded train cars and material stockpiles, in real-time," Maptek core technologies product manager Chris Green said.

"Displaying real-time grade control data over scheduling activities provides critical information in context.

"Live and interactive simulation of scenarios via a digital twin of the real mining environment can provide surprising insights [and] virtually a risk-free mode for decision-making."

Forty-year-old Australia-headquartered Maptek is among the largest global suppliers of exploration and mine planning and business-intelligence software and hardware.

Victoria-based LlamaZOO Interactive, founded only four years ago by Charles Lavigne and Kevin Oke, has won various start-up awards and been recognised in annual DisruptMining events in Canada. Its LlamaZOO MineLife VR offering "fuses complex geospatial and mine planning data with IoT data into an interactive, life-sized virtual replica of the planned, current, and future states of a mine site".

Lavigne and Oke aimed to bring their extensive experience in the videogame industry with companies such as Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft to a start-up developing technology for industrial use.

"Users can explore an entire operation from source to port or facility, see hypothetical scenarios and real-time data, create a variety of presentation media such as 360-degree images, flight paths and export these to other more traditional media access points such as web," said Lavigne.