Virtual Reality for Interactive Molecular Design and Simulation

Date

Feb 6, 2020

Time

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Speaker

David Glowacki

Affiliation

University of Bristol, UK

Language

en

Main Topic

Biologie

Host

Dora Tang

Description

The mechanics of nanoscale molecular objects are relatively well characterized owing to decades of study. Nevertheless, because dynamics at this scale differ from the familiar mechanics of everyday objects, they are often non-intuitive, even for highly trained researchers. Moreover, because molecular systems have many of degrees of freedom, their motion involves a complicated, highly correlated, and 3D many-body dynamical choreography with few analogues in day-to-day experience. Building on recent research in psychology and neuroscience which highlights the benefits of multisensory processing, we have begun to explore the application of immersive technologies like virtual reality (VR) to enhance researchers’ cognition of nanoscale domains, enabling the design and manipulation of real-time simulations of molecular structures in 3D. In this talk, I will focus on our recent efforts designing Narupa, a flexible, open-source, multi-person VR software framework which enables groups of researchers to simultaneously cohabit real-time simulation environments and interactively build, inspect, visualize, and manipulate the dynamics of complex molecular structures with atomic-level precision. I will outline a range of application domains where we are using Narupa to obtain microscopic insight into 3D dynamical concepts across both bio and materials science.

Last modified: Feb 7, 2020, 12:08:27 AM