Using Immersive Virtual Reality
for Visualizing and Modeling
of Molecular Nanosystems
This is an abstract
for a talk to be given at the
Fifth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology.
There will be a link from here to the full article when it is
available on the web.
The Argonne Futures Lab group is exploring the use of
spatially immersive virtual reality systems (e.g., CAVE� and ImmersaDesk�
) for interactive modeling and visualization of nanotechnology
relevant molecular systems. Traditional 3D orthographic displays
do not provide the user with a natural or intuitive way to
interact with such systems, because of the complexity, novelty,
and scale of systems relevant to nanotechnology. The goal of our
work is to characterize the role that immersive virtual reality
can play in improving the user's effectiveness in conceiving,
modeling, and understanding large-scale molecular nanostructures.
Spatially immersive display (SID) devices surround the user in
real space with a 3D computer-generated visual and audio scene
that is responsive to the user's point of view, orientation, and
action. SIDs typically are based on multiple large-format stereo
projection systems and can provide 3D views to multiple users. We
believe that immersive technology will improve a design team's
ability to develop physical "3D intuition" for
structure, mechanism and synthesis pathways of large-scale
molecular designs. We also believe that nanotechnology CAD
environments must be usable by several people simultaneously
(ideally as part of a collaboratory or collaborative design
environment) and that SIDs offer significant advantages relative
to traditional displays or head mounted displays for
collaboratively designing and exploring engineered molecular
structures.
We will report on the results of a set of experiments
comparing nonimmersive, partially immersive and fully immersive
display systems on a set of common tasks associated with the
engineering, modeling and design of structures relevant to
nanotechnology. In particular we are studying single and
multiple-user "projection/pursuit" tasks such as
determining the location of defects in complex molecular
lattices, understanding the dynamics of molecule-molecule
interactions, and determining optimal space filling molecular
designs.
Also if space and time permits we will report on the role and
effectiveness of including explicit collaboration support in the
modeling and visualization software environment.
*Corresponding Address:
Rick Stevens, Argonne National Laboratory, Office A-119 Bldg.
221, Argonne, IL 60441, ph: 630-252-3378, fax: 630-252-5986,
email: [email protected]
|