The author, left, and Dr. David Glowacki, cofounder of Interactive Scientific, toss virtual molecules at each other in Bristol Univesity’s VR lab.COURTESY OF ALEXA WEBER MORALES
BRISTOL, ENGLAND—Writing doesn’t do justice to virtual reality. Nor does looking at an animated, 2D image do anything to convey the feeling of scuba diving through space, playing catch with molecules of buckminsterfullerene. Wearing off-the-shelf VR gear, I found it surprisingly addictive to tie knots in proteins or thread carbon nanotubes. But these VR journeys into the molecular level aren’t just fun—they reveal important details of how nature is built and behaves, and could hold keys to engineering nanosystems, combating antimicrobial resistance, and making progress to understand neurodegenerative disease.
I’m in an oatmeal-colored room with institutional furniture and an inconspicuous HTC Vive setup that comprise a VR laboratory at Bristol University. Dr. David Glowacki, a Royal Society Research Fellow since 2013, fits me with a head-mounted display and a controller in each hand and lets me try various tasks that have important uses in natural and engineered nanosystems.
I can switch the representation from a ball-and-stick model to electron clouds, or add trails so that as I crash molecules together I can poke my head into the comet tails they leave behind, assessing the finer details of their vibrational motion. Finally, I play catch with Glowacki when he joins me in the Tron-like simulated space, passing simulated molecules back and forth.
“Use the controllers to grab opposite sides of the molecule. Now try to feel the sort of yogic motion required to throw it toward me,” he says. After a few minutes, he praises me for my “chemical intuition”—meaning a gut-level feel for how this world works. We’re using the iMD (interactive molecular dynamics) VR version of Nano Simbox, created by the company Glowacki cofounded, Interactive Scientific (iSci), which lets anyone visit and play with the invisible molecular world. It turns out that this chemical intuition is something laypeople and scientists alike come by easily while using Nano Simbox’s immersive experience.
Glowacki’s team of researchers recently published a paper in Science Advances describing their experimentation with iMD VR to enable chemical intuition on detailed models, ones that react in real-time and deliver physics that accurately reflect the real dynamics of the nanoscale world. Glowacki hopes the publication of this paper will encourage thousands of new users to test the framework.
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Source: Forbes