RING finds its origin in the long tradition of combined engineering and Geosciences of the Nancy School of Geology, which has considered computer programming as part of the modern geologist's toolbox since the time of punch cards. Following the development of several automatic contouring methods in the 70's and 80's (GEOL, Cartolab), the research group increased its international recognition since the gOcad project was initiated in 1989 by Prof. Jean-Laurent Mallet.

The main technology breakthrough of the gOcad project was the combination of triangulated surfaces and Discrete Smooth Interpolation to represent complex geological structures such as salt diapirs. To address some limitations of the classical institutional funding structures, Jean-Laurent Mallet created the Gocad Research Consortium to provide financial and technical support to the project. This consortium developed our culture of industry collaboration through direct interaction with sponsors. After a few years, the fruitfult collaboration between Consortium Members and the Gocad Research Group gave birth to the Gocad software. To ensure maintenance, support and consulting services, the Gocad software became the leading commercial product of the EarthDecision company, created in 1998, then acquired by Paradigm Geophysical in 2006.

Since 2007, the research consortium and the research group have been directed by Guillaume Caumon. Pauline Collon and Paul Cupillard joined RING as co-directors of RING in 2007 and 2012, respectively. RING has been continuing exploring and pushing the limits of geomodeling technology through original R&D capitalizing on more than 25 years of research and development, in the area of well and fault correlation, karst modelling, meshing for simulation, and inverse problems.