A biotech software company based on the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) campus is blending blockchain and virtual reality to transform the way scientists research their fields, and how that information is shared. Called Matryx, a subsidiary of Nanome, Inc., the virtual reality and blockchain startup already has products available on the Steam and Oculus web stores.
“We’ve been experimenting various virtual reality interfaces for scientists and engineers,” Matryx CEO Steve McCloskey told me. “We have a team of 15 engineers engineers focusing on the molecular level in virtual reality. Our tools, which are designed for the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, will entail an array of aspects, from complex math visualizations to molecular level modeling of organic compounds.”
Nano one, and its enterprise version Nano Pro, is a molecular design suite for B2B sales, and is presently tailored towards the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. “Are you ready to build organic molecules, such as Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen and Hydrogen?” asks Nanome on the products Steam description. “Nano-one is the first molecular visualization and modeling tool for today’s virtual reality platforms.”
CalcFlow is Matryx’s complex mathematics-based mass visualization tool, allowing users to work on math equations in 3D virtual reality. Users can manipulate vectors with their hands and controllers similar to any video game. While users shape 3D images, the program tracks the mathematical equations needed to re-create the shape.
“Manipulate vectors with your hands, explore vector addition and cross product,” reads the company’s description on Steam of CalcFlow. “See and feel a double integral of sinusoidal graph in 3D, a mobius strip and it’s normal, and spherical coordinates. Create your own parametrized function and vector field!” In laymen’s terms, pretty exciting stuff.
“With Calc Flow users use a 3D-graphing calculator to create three-dimensional shapes with calculus in virtual reality,” note McCloskey, a 2010 graduate from the world’s first Nanoengineering Department at UC San Diego. “Calc Flow allows users to intuitively create shapes like never before. Before functions would be typed out on a calculator, but we see Calc Flow has offering a new avenue.”
Already serving industry, academia, and consumers with CalcFlow and nano-one, Matryx wants to now incentivize collaborations on the Matryx platform with a token-based bounty system built atop blockchain technology.
“Pharmaceutical companies, Universities and people would place a bounty for solutions to specific problems,” elucidates McCloskey. “Parameters could be time and money willing to be spent. User contributions towards, say, a new medicine or rocket turbine even a spaceship on our platform, could earn them bounties in MTX tokens for those solutions which are proven to work.” These science-fueling tokens are being issued on Ethereum as ERC20 standard tokens, a way for developers to easily create their own cryptocurrencies.
“Our game theory-based bounty system is being deigned to spur the use of VR products, which we feel are the future of science, to discover new medicines, and more,” says McCloskey. “And blockchain is what truly makes the incentivisation aspect possible.” Cryptocurrencies, he says, will allow online game and virtual reality applications to truly interface with the real world.
“Virtual worlds and virtual currencies in the future will be interdependent,” opines McCloskey. “We want to tap into blockchains and cryptocurrencies in such a way so as to promote scientific collaboration in the institution and the greater blockchain-based Matryx community.”
Source: The Drum