Virtual Reality

I haven't worked with VR for a while now, but I still believe that it has a lot to offer molecular modellers, especially as our images are already artificial, so that fast, cheap rendering doesn't bother us, like it does for example surgeons or architects.

We waste so much concentration using dials and joysticks to dock a ligand with 6 degrees of freedom into a protein, and then change viewpoint with at least another 3 degrees of freedom. Simply moving a ligand into a known position can take a minute or more with dials, compared with a few seconds to grab a virtual object and position it by natural hand movements, and the latter takes no thought at all away from the real work.

One problem used to be the resolution/cost ratio of screens didn't suit real users, but that's changing fast.

And then there are force-feedback joysticks to relay information about docking energies to the user in the most obvious way.

UNC are still developing the VR system I worked on :

HMD ultrasound project at UNC

And this isn't strictly VR, but it's dead neat :

The Nano Manipulator

(MRH homepage)