Following the Perth launch, events will be held in Brisbane, Australia, and international launches throughout the company's global offices, including Russia, North America, Indonesia, the UK and South Africa.

Micromine 2016 is the 16th version of the application, which enables users to capture, manage and interpret critical data, and is relevant to all stages of the mineral extraction process.

According to the company, Micromine provides explorers with an in-depth understanding of their project so they can target prospective regions more effectively, increasing the chance of a project's success; it gives miners easy-to-use modelling, estimation, planning and design tools to simplify day-to-day production tasks.

Commenting on the upcoming release, Micromine's technical product manager, Frank Bilki, said: "After nearly two years of continuous development and many hundreds of individual changes, we're close to finalising Micromine 2016.

"This year's release has something for everyone. Many of the updates are Core features that benefit every user, not just those with extra modules. They include simple timesavers like being able to drop any supported file into Micromine from an outside location, and a Project Explorer pane that provides direct access to all of the files in a project."

MICROMINE listed other Core enhancements:

• 3-D PDF output, which produces PDFs where users can interactively show and hide layers, rotate, pan and zoom the display, and even measure distances and directions, right within Adobe Acrobat Reader;
• Dynamic field expressions that let users write ‘equations' wherever they would select an input field, together with an expression-based calculator that takes full advantage of this enhancement;
• Quick-find options for locating drill holes and wireframes (triangulations) within a mass of data; and
• Maximum Intensity Projection for the Vizex Point layer for visualising trends in huge point clouds. This is extremely useful when preparing data for Implicit Modelling or Geostatistics.

MICROMINE also stated that explorers will benefit from a suite of flexible new drill-hole planning tools that includes options for designing straight or curved holes from the bottom up or the top down. As an added timesaver, customers working in a mature area can easily use an existing hole as a template for a planned hole.

Other changes for explorers and resource geologists include new chart axis formatting options; stereonet improvements that include Fisher contours and pole-group definitions; improved statistical cross-validation, which now supports all interpolation methods and modelling parameters; a new block model assign option that writes the properties of rotated and sub-blocked models to a file; and improved multiple indicator kriging.

Bilki added: "We've also made major changes to our implicit modelling module, the largest of which is the inclusion of a varying structural trend in the modelling process. Our implicit modeller now accommodates changes in the direction of the geological structures under investigation. We've also added new radial basis function (RBF) solver options so users can tailor the solver to the data. Other changes include a new output file option that saves the implicit model equation for later reuse; better handling of unassigned rock codes in lithology modelling."