pdbARbrowser + Dissertation Work
Background
pdbARbrowser (previously VisMo and VisMe) is a collaboration between Dr. Alan B. Craig and Max Collins, funded by the NSF Blue Waters Student Internship Program. We successfully developed a pipeline for visualizing any PDB (Protein Data Bank) protein using Augmented Reality in various representation styles. Users can then manipulate the 3D model in their physical space in various ways. This work is published here. We began pdbARbrowser in a NSF funded internship hosted by Shodor, and since the conclusion of that internship we have continued to grow this project. Read more about this work with Blue Waters here. We are excited to release this project-- release date (Android and iOS) TBA.
We built this project using Unity 3D and an allocation on the Blue Waters Supercomputer, molecular data from the PDB, VMD, scripting languages such as c#, javascript, tcl, cgi, and managed both ends of querying a server. We used an iterative design process, and surveyed active professors, researchers, and students to inform the design and functionality of the application. A video of pdbARbrowser in action can be found here.
As a separate project we are developing a collaborative AR app and we gave a talk at the April 20, 2021 ECSS Symposium (given as a follow up to this June 18, 2019 ECSS Symposium talk).
pdbARbrowser uses image-based (fiducial marker) tracking. The target image, as well as screenshots from real use of pdbARbrowser can be found below.
To cite: M. Collins and A. B. Craig, “VisMo: Augmented Reality Visualization of Scientific Data and Molecular Structures,” The Journal of Computational Science Education, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 12–15, Jan. 2017, doi: 10.22369/issn.2153-4136/8/1/3.
