produces roughly 3,6 million tonnes of ore a year across three shafts — Nchwaning II, Nchwaning III and

Gloria. Until 2021, each shaft ran its own control rooms, its own operating philosophy and its own view of

production. Oculus Operational Innovations designed, engineered and delivered the Integrated Remote

Operations Centre (iROC): a single, purpose-built facility from which 21 operators oversee the entire value

chain — from the face underground to load-out — on a horseshoe video wall of 84 display panels. The

installation set two industry benchmarks: the longest continuous TBC SmartTrac operator console built to

date, and the largest SDVoE AV-over-IP video wall deployed in an industrial environment. More important

than the records is the operational shift it enabled: from reactive, shaft-by-shaft responses to proactive,

whole-of-mine decision-making from one central point.

THE CHALLENGE: A WORLD-CLASS MINE, MANAGED IN SILOS

BRMO sits in the Kalahari, about 80 km north-west of Kuruman — a remote, harsh environment where every

hour of coordinated production counts. The operation had grown into a highly decentralised structure:

each shaft independently monitored its mining, processing and essential services through separate control

rooms drawing on separate SCADA, OMI, CCTV and historian systems. No single person could see the

value chain end to end. Deviations were detected where they occurred, not where they mattered, and

coordination across shafts relied on phone calls between rooms. BRMO’s leadership, supported by ARM

project engineering, set out a clear intent: consolidate monitoring and control of all mining activities into

one central facility, with the flexibility to absorb future expansion.

THE BRIEF: ONE CONTRACTOR, EVERY DISCIPLINE

A control room of this scale is not an AV project, a furniture project or an IT project — it is all of these at

once, and the risk lives in the interfaces between them. Under contract AMM/iROC/21/0017 (iROC

equipping and furnishing, supply and installation), BRMO appointed Oculus as the single point of

accountability for the design, supply and integration management of the full fit-out: operator consoles,

the video wall and its signal backbone, ergonomics, lighting interfaces and the coordination of multiple

specialist vendors into one working facility — delivered within scope and cost, on an operating mine site,

through 2021 and 2022.

THE SOLUTION: THE IROC

At the heart of the iROC is a horseshoe-shaped operations floor: 21 operator stations wrapped by a

continuous video wall of 84 main display panels (49-inch class), with a further 84 operator displays (24-inch)

at the desks. Each station is allocated four wall panels, centrally aligned with the operator’s console — the

wall is not a passive billboard but a direct extension of every workstation, with full drill-down and

operational functionality. The layout maps the mine’s functional locations onto the floor: essential services,

mining and processing for each of the three shafts, surface ore transport, product stockyard and load-

out, plus supervisory capacity.

ENGINEERING THE BACKBONE

Any source, any screen, instantly — that was the design requirement for the visual layer. Oculus specified

an SDVoE AV-over-IP architecture managed through VuWall’s TRx platform, combining video wall control,

AV distribution and KVM management on standard network infrastructure. The result is genuine flexibility:

operators can extend, switch and composite real-time signals from any of the mine’s systems to any panel

on the wall or any desk, without matrix switchers or fixed signal paths. The architecture scales by adding

endpoints, which protects BRMO’s investment as the operation expands. Redundancy was engineered in

deliberately: every functional application can be opened on any of the 21 stations, and the wall follows

— a failed desk never means a blind spot on the value chain.

DESIGNED AROUND THE OPERATOR

Technology alone does not change how a mine is run; people do. The iROC applies a strict situational-

awareness philosophy: calm, low-contrast graphics when the process runs normally, so that colour and

motion are reserved for the moments that demand attention. Alarming on the wall is deliberately sparse

and tiered — critical value-chain events command the wall, plant-level alarms stay at the console, and a

site emergency spans every panel in the room. Information is structured in four levels, from area-wide KPIs

on the wall down to equipment detail at the desk, so an operator can move from “something is drifting”

to “this motor, this conveyor” in seconds. The continuous SmartTrac console, sightline-aligned wall panels

and station-by-station functional layout all serve the same goal: reducing the cognitive load of monitoring

a whole mine to something one focused team can carry, shift after shift.

THE OUTCOME

BRMO now runs its entire value chain from one room. Centralised monitoring gave the operation a holistic,

real-time view across all three shafts, enabling proactive intervention rather than reactive response, and

lifting the efficiency and productivity of the mining operation as a whole. The facility carries two industry

distinctions, but its real measure is quieter: decisions that used to travel between control rooms by

telephone are now made in seconds, in context, by people who can see the whole operation in front of

them.

ABOUT OCULUS OPERATIONAL INNOVATIONS

Oculus designs, fabricates and delivers complete control room and visualisation solutions for mission-

critical environments — carrying single-point accountability from user requirements and ergonomic design

through fabrication, fit-out and AV integration to handover and support, delivered within scope and within

cost.