Abstract
Immersive technologies like stereo rendering, virtual reality, or augmented reality (AR) are often used in the field of molecular visualisation. Modern, comparably lightweight and affordable AR headsets like Microsoft’s HoloLens open up new possibilities for immersive analytics in molecular visualisation. A crucial factor for a comprehensive analysis of molecular data in AR is the rendering speed. HoloLens, however, has limited hardware capabilities due to requirements like battery life, fanless cooling and weight. Consequently, insights from best practises for powerful desktop hardware may not be transferable. Therefore, we evaluate the capabilities of the HoloLens hardware for modern, GPU-enabled, high-quality rendering methods for the space-filling model commonly used in molecular visualisation. We also assess the scalability for large molecular data sets. Based on the results, we discuss ideas and possibilities for immersive molecular analytics. Besides more obvious benefits like the stereoscopic rendering offered by the device, this specifically includes natural user interfaces that use physical navigation instead of the traditional virtual one. Furthermore, we consider different scenarios for such an immersive system, ranging from educational use to collaborative scenarios.
Highlights
The software tools developed in bioinformatics to support the understanding of data, for instance, in structural biology or computational chemistry traditionally make use of scientific visualisation to analyse data, for example simulated protein interactions
We have presented a prototypical Augmented reality (AR) molecular visualisation application for HoloLens
We used publicly available protein data sets obtained from the RSCB Protein Data Bank (PDB) [11], our results are reproducible and meaningful for real-world data
Summary
The software tools developed in bioinformatics to support the understanding of data, for instance, in structural biology or computational chemistry traditionally make use of scientific visualisation to analyse data, for example simulated protein interactions. Popular desktop tools for molecular visualisation like VMD [1] or PyMOL [2] often support stereoscopic rendering, for example using head-mounted virtual reality (VR) displays like Oculus Rift, or powerwalls [3] and CAVE-like systems [4]. This rendering mode helps to convey the complex spatial structure of molecular data. Very little is known about the graphics capabilities of the whole system It has not yet been thoroughly investigated how HoloLens can handle molecular visualisation using state-of-the-art rendering methods tailored to modern desktop hardware.
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