Authors:
Kenny Gruchalla
;
Jonathan Marbach
and
Mark Dubin
Affiliation:
University of Colorado at Boulder, United States
Keyword(s):
Immersive visualization, molecular visualization, virtual reality, software engineering, biology.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Environments
;
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Distributed Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality
;
Graphical Interfaces
;
Interactive Environments
;
Real-Time Graphics
Abstract:
Immersive virtual environments are becoming increasingly common, driving the need to develop new software or adapt existing software to these environments. We discuss some of the issues and limitations of porting an existing molecular graphics system, PyMOL, into an immersive virtual environment. Presenting macromolecules inside an interactive immersive virtual environment may provide unique insights into molecular structure and improve the rational design of drugs that target a specific molecule. PyMOL was successfully extended to render molecular structures immersively; however, elements of the legacy interactive design did not scale well into three-dimensions. Achieving an interactive frame rate for large macromolecules was also an issue. The immersive system was developed and evaluated on both a shared-memory parallel machine and a commodity cluster.