Do you want to see how cumulus clouds gather, what happens if Holland’s dikes break, how medicine interacts with proteins in your body? Michal Koutek and his colleagues developed a Virtual Reality (VR) environment to visualize data from scientific simulations.
/strong>
In the VR laboratory of the Computer Graphics group (ITS faculty) you can experience what it’s like to have your head in the clouds. With a plexipad (a transparent interaction panel) in one hand and an interaction stylus in the other, Michal Koutek stands behind a Virtual Workbench (a large VR laboratory table) and opens one of the many clouds that are floating in front of us. During his PhD project, which he defended last Monday, Koutek, who hails from the Czech Republic, studied how scientific data can be visualized in Virtual Reality (VR) environments.
The cloud Koutek just opened is colored red on the inside, representing an upward airflow. But the cloud boundaries are colored green and blue, showing downward airflow. ,,Atmospheric studies revealed a thin shell of descending air around clouds”, Koutek says. ,,But the origin of this motion is still in discussion. By visualizing the thermo-dynamic processes in VR we hope to identify the origin of this phenomenon. We also visualize the transport of moisture into and outside the cumulus cloud, the mixing process.”
To see how molecules interact, Koutek and his colleagues designed the MolDRIVE system, which enables users to work with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in a VR environment. Researchers use this software to see for example how a certain medicine reacts when encountering the flu virus in your body.
Dimensions
Standing at the Workbench, Koutek now shows a simulation of a protein in the VR environment. Pointing at an atom of protein with a stylus, Koutek uses a spring manipulator (an interaction tool he developed) to exert a force on the atom. The tool clearly provides visual force feedback. Koutek: ,,As soon as you learn to select a single atom using the laser pointer technique, it’s very easy to manipulate the whole chain of atoms. You can try to unfold the protein yourself.”
Instead of making visualizations with keyboard and mouse on 2D screens, visualization in a VR environment provides interactive virtual objects. According to Koutek, there are many reasons why VR is highly suitable for scientific visualization. ,,Data often have more dimensions and complicated structures, as in the case of molecules, clouds or fluid dynamics simulations. In interpreting these data, shapes and relations of 3D structures are very important,” Koutek explains. ,,2D images cannot always show these structures properly. VR offers an interactive 3D environment, providing a better spatial orientation and judgment.” VR also allows rapid and intuitive exploration of the data, enabling various phenomena at different places to be discovered andexplored
Koutek and his colleagues developed the VRX toolkit (Virtual Reality eXplorer), a visualization software environment for simulated or measured data. Among the workbench’s useful tools for interactive data visualization are the plexipad and stylus (comparable to a pen-and-mouse pad), which allow users to navigate easily in the data and intuitively interact with the whole visualization environment. ,,The pen-and-pad metaphor, plexipad in one hand and the stylus in the other hand, proved to be very useful”, Koutek says.
Medicine
The engineers and physicists whose data were visualized during this PhD project were enthusiastic. ,,However, it will take some time before they will perform visualization in VR themselves, on their own personal computers. Perhaps it’ll happen when the VR hardware becomes cheaper and better standardized”, says Koutek, who predicts we could have personal VR on our desktops within ten years, using easy-to-use visualization software that does not require VR or visualization specialists as service providers.
Currently, Koutek is working as a post-doc at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where he conducts research on interaction with autonomous robots from Virtual Reality. The work he did at TU Delft is not going to waste, however. Jaap Flohil, and his TU spin-off company Foldyne, will further develop Koutek’s work. ,,We will design new visualization tools for the analysis of our molecular simulations”, Flohil says. ,,For example visualization of complex three-dimensional interactions between molecules. This will provide valuable insights for drug design. In the end we want to design a medicine on the computer and in VR, but that’s still a vision of the future.”
Do you want to see how cumulus clouds gather, what happens if Holland’s dikes break, how medicine interacts with proteins in your body? Michal Koutek and his colleagues developed a Virtual Reality (VR) environment to visualize data from scientific simulations.
In the VR laboratory of the Computer Graphics group (ITS faculty) you can experience what it’s like to have your head in the clouds. With a plexipad (a transparent interaction panel) in one hand and an interaction stylus in the other, Michal Koutek stands behind a Virtual Workbench (a large VR laboratory table) and opens one of the many clouds that are floating in front of us. During his PhD project, which he defended last Monday, Koutek, who hails from the Czech Republic, studied how scientific data can be visualized in Virtual Reality (VR) environments.
The cloud Koutek just opened is colored red on the inside, representing an upward airflow. But the cloud boundaries are colored green and blue, showing downward airflow. ,,Atmospheric studies revealed a thin shell of descending air around clouds”, Koutek says. ,,But the origin of this motion is still in discussion. By visualizing the thermo-dynamic processes in VR we hope to identify the origin of this phenomenon. We also visualize the transport of moisture into and outside the cumulus cloud, the mixing process.”
To see how molecules interact, Koutek and his colleagues designed the MolDRIVE system, which enables users to work with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in a VR environment. Researchers use this software to see for example how a certain medicine reacts when encountering the flu virus in your body.
Dimensions
Standing at the Workbench, Koutek now shows a simulation of a protein in the VR environment. Pointing at an atom of protein with a stylus, Koutek uses a spring manipulator (an interaction tool he developed) to exert a force on the atom. The tool clearly provides visual force feedback. Koutek: ,,As soon as you learn to select a single atom using the laser pointer technique, it’s very easy to manipulate the whole chain of atoms. You can try to unfold the protein yourself.”
Instead of making visualizations with keyboard and mouse on 2D screens, visualization in a VR environment provides interactive virtual objects. According to Koutek, there are many reasons why VR is highly suitable for scientific visualization. ,,Data often have more dimensions and complicated structures, as in the case of molecules, clouds or fluid dynamics simulations. In interpreting these data, shapes and relations of 3D structures are very important,” Koutek explains. ,,2D images cannot always show these structures properly. VR offers an interactive 3D environment, providing a better spatial orientation and judgment.” VR also allows rapid and intuitive exploration of the data, enabling various phenomena at different places to be discovered andexplored
Koutek and his colleagues developed the VRX toolkit (Virtual Reality eXplorer), a visualization software environment for simulated or measured data. Among the workbench’s useful tools for interactive data visualization are the plexipad and stylus (comparable to a pen-and-mouse pad), which allow users to navigate easily in the data and intuitively interact with the whole visualization environment. ,,The pen-and-pad metaphor, plexipad in one hand and the stylus in the other hand, proved to be very useful”, Koutek says.
Medicine
The engineers and physicists whose data were visualized during this PhD project were enthusiastic. ,,However, it will take some time before they will perform visualization in VR themselves, on their own personal computers. Perhaps it’ll happen when the VR hardware becomes cheaper and better standardized”, says Koutek, who predicts we could have personal VR on our desktops within ten years, using easy-to-use visualization software that does not require VR or visualization specialists as service providers.
Currently, Koutek is working as a post-doc at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where he conducts research on interaction with autonomous robots from Virtual Reality. The work he did at TU Delft is not going to waste, however. Jaap Flohil, and his TU spin-off company Foldyne, will further develop Koutek’s work. ,,We will design new visualization tools for the analysis of our molecular simulations”, Flohil says. ,,For example visualization of complex three-dimensional interactions between molecules. This will provide valuable insights for drug design. In the end we want to design a medicine on the computer and in VR, but that’s still a vision of the future.”
Comments are closed.