Before it started creating 3D visualizations of mine sites, Victoria-based LlamaZoo Interactive was helping veterinarian students virtually dissect dogs. Using technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), video game industry veterans Charles Lavigne and Kevin Oke created EasyAnatomy, the world's first virtual reality canine dissection experience, which can also help vets better explain to pet owners what may be wrong with their pups.
With canine cadavers as a successful case study, Lavigne and Oke looked for another real-world application for their technology. Being from British Columbia, a province known for its natural resources, the pair decided to pitch its software to the mining industry. The duo was undeterred by the industry's old-school reputation of being reluctant to try new technologies.
"Geology is the anatomy of the earth," says Lavigne, LlamaZoo's chief executive officer, who founded the company in 2014 with Oke, the vice-president of business development.
They started big by pitching Vancouver-based Teck Resources (TSX: TECK.B; NYSE: TECK), Canada's largest diversified mining company, at the 2017 annual Association for Mineral Exploration Roundup conference in Vancouver.
"It was a shot in the dark," recalls Lavigne, but, to his surprise, Teck was immediately interested and not long after meeting the entrepreneurs, invited Lavigne and Oke to visit their steelmaking coal mines in B.C.'s Elk Valley.
Teck became LlamaZoo's first mining client, followed by Goldcorp (now part of Newmont Goldcorp (TSX: NGT; NYSE: NEM), Anglo American (LON: AAL) and others around the world who are using or have used LlamaZoo's MineLife VR platform.
MineLife collects huge volumes of data generated by companies - such as geology, drill hole information and infrastructure plans - to create a visual representation of the mine site.
The visualizations are used for mine planning as well as community outreach. The company's software platform allows users to view the site virtually, including everything from its topography to infrastructure, without having to go there. MineLife also allows an underground ore body to be viewed in 3D.
"We are effectively using gaming technology to bring together large, disparate spatial data sets ... that go beyond the static representation," such as maps and spreadsheets, Lavigne says.
Lavigne says MineLife not only saves companies the cost and carbon footprint of flying people to remote mine sites, but is also used to help stakeholders better understand proposed projects. It also helps miners improve their mine site planning, logistics, training and stakeholder engagement, speeding up the process to get the operation running sooner.
"It can be used as a tool for companies to better understand the entire scope and scale of a project and to better interact with stakeholders by providing a virtual data room ... for everyone to use," he says.
For example, LlamaZoo's MineLife software helped the Galore Creek Mining Corp. - the company set up by Teck and Newmont Goldcorp to develop the Galore Creek project in northwestern B.C. - with its community outreach, which the company says helped to "restore project momentum in a cost-effective manner." According to a case study on its website, Galore Creek Mining saved between $100,000 and $250,000 on planned site visits by using MineLife.
In the latest PwC BC Mining Report, published earlier this year, Teck said LlamaZoo's technology helped the companies better understand the project and support a renewed understanding of Galore Creek with the Tahltan community. (Galore Creek is within the territory of the Tahltan Nation). Teck also said in the report that it was using the technology for some of its projects in other jurisdictions and to help develop mine expansion plans.
MineLife was also used at the Roy Hill iron ore project in Western Australia to help the company digitalize the site from source to port, providing a deeper scale and understanding of its operations. Roy Hill is 70% owned by Hancock Prospecting and 30% by a consortium of Marubeni Corp., POSCO, and China Steel Corp.
What's more, LlamaZoo's team didn't have to travel to Australia to develop the site visualization, using instead the data already available from various sources.
"That's the beauty of it," Lavigne says. "The technology allows us to visualize a site anywhere in the world without having the leave the office. ... Nobody has to go on-site to see the data. You can have specialists and analysts all over the world collaborating," without having to physically meet.
MineLife is also evolving to include real-time data and tracking such as the position of a mining truck, tracking animals on a site, and the routes of a train or a ship carrying the commodities.
"We can create a real-time representation of the operations and operating conditions of the site, so it can be better used for communications and decision-making by all stakeholders, including communities and First Nations as well as [mining company] executives," Lavigne says.
LlamaZoo has seen growing interest from mining companies but is also branching out into other resource industries such as energy and forestry.
"Anywhere where there's big spatial data can benefit from our technology," he says. For instance, he says the company is branching out into the telecommunications sector around cell tower deployment. "The goal is to make sure we take the learnings from each industry and roll it into a broader solution that can be applied more strategically."