The emerging of BIM (Building Information Modeling) techniques will change traditional procedures of design and maintenance for electric substations. In addition, Computational Holography, supported by wearable computers, has the potential to allow simultaneous engineering work, based on mixed reality and computer vision capabilities. It is believed that this set of tools will increase engineering design decisions. In this work, we propose a set of techniques to support a complete substation design, which is created by using BIM concepts that explore the Holographic world benefices. Experiments have shown that the coupling of these techniques has the potential to reduce the learning curve of the users, since it changes the way of collaboration among different professional specialists considering simulation intents.

The profits and benefits offered by Virtual Reality technology had drawn attention of professionals from several scientific fields, including the power systems', either for training or maintenance. For this purpose, 3D modeling is evidently pointed out as an imperative process for the conception of a Virtual Environment. Before the complexity of Hydroelectric Power Plants and Virtual Reality's contribution for the Industrial area, planning the tridimensional construction of the virtual environment becomes necessary. Thus, this paper presents modeling techniques applicable to several hydroelectric structures, aiming to optimize the 3D construction of the target complexes.

In this work, an electric power energy utility company, called CEMIG, is a research partner with more than 50 electric substations, whose operation can be improved by using virtual environments. Therefore, time to model all these substations, with a high-level of required photorealism, is a critical issue. To achieve this goal, this paper presents a pertinent and appropriate methodology. First, data is retrieved from field components (CADs, satellite images, manufacturer sheets etc.) to model suitable electric components by means of dimensioning and angles. Next, rules such as cable connectors positioning and monitoring of the quantity of polygons (low-poly) are established. In addition, since each electric substation has circuit arrangements composed of different electric components, a pattern recognition tool is applied to extract information from 2D basic plants in order to generate automatic positioning of components within a virtual substation. Also, considering the need for control and monitoring of the electric system, in real time, a set of interface templates are provided to support direct access to data from supervisory system (SCADA), without the loss of immersion and navigation which are imperative for Virtual Reality applications. In the very first trials used for generating a virtual electric substation a lot of work and time was spent by our research team. After the establishment of the proposed methodology, results show that the time to generate new substations was reduced by the order of 83%.