Building blocks for commodity augmented reality-based molecular visualization and modeling in web browsers

A Concise Review of Biomolecule Visualization

The structural characteristics of biomolecules are a major focus in the field of structural biology. Molecular visualization plays a crucial role in displaying structural information in an intuitive manner, aiding in the understanding of molecular properties. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of core concepts, key techniques, and tools in molecular visualization. Additionally, it presents the latest research findings to uncover emerging trends and highlights the challenges and potential directions for the development of the field.

cleAR: an interoperable architecture for multi-user AR-based school curricula

Although there are some experiences that demonstrate the validity of the use of augmented reality in schools to help students understand and retain complex concepts, augmented reality has not been widely adopted in the education sector yet. This is in part because it is hard to use augmented reality applications in collaborative learning scenarios and to integrate them in the existing school curricula. In this work, we present an interoperable architecture that simplifies the creation of augmented reality applications, enables multi-user student collaboration and provides advanced mechanisms for data analysis and visualization. A review of the literature together with a survey answered by 47 primary and secondary school teachers allowed us to identify the design objectives of cleAR, an architecture for augmented reality-based collaborative educational applications. cleAR has been validated through the development of three proofs of concept. cleAR provides a more mature technological ecosystem that will foster the emergence of augmented reality applications for education and their inclusion in existing school programs.

Augmented Reality, a Review of a Way to Represent and Manipulate 3D Chemical Structures

Augmented reality (AR) is a mixed technology that superimposes three-dimensional (3D) digital data onto an image of reality. This technology enables users to represent and manipulate 3D chemical structures. In spite of its potential, the use of these tools in chemistry is still scarce. The aim of this work is to identify the real situation of AR developments and its potential for 3D visualization of molecules. A descriptive analysis of a selection of 143 research publications (extracted from Web of Science between 2018 and 2020) highlights some significant AR examples that had been implemented in chemistry, in both education and research environments. Although the traditional 2D screen visualization is still preferred when teaching chemistry, the application of AR in early education has shown potential to facilitate the understanding and visualization of chemical structures. The increasing connectivity of the AR technology to web platforms and scientific networks should translate into new opportunities for teaching and learning strategies.

Online tools to easily build virtual molecular models for display in augmented and virtual reality on the web

Several groups developed in the last years augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) software to visualize 3D molecules, most rather static, limited in content, and requiring software installs, some even requiring expensive hardware. We launched in 2020 moleculARweb (https://molecularweb.epfl.ch), a website that offers interactive content for chemistry and structural biology education through commodity web-based AR that works on consumer devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops. Among thousands of users, teachers increasingly request more biological macromolecules to be available, a demand that we cannot address individually. Therefore, to allow users to build their own material, we built a web interface where they can create online AR experiences in few steps starting from Protein Data Bank, AlphaFold or custom uploaded structures, or from virtual objects/scenes exported from the Visual Molecular Dynamics program, without any programming knowledge. The web tool also returns WebXR sessions for viewing and manipulating the models in WebXR-compatible devices including smartphones, tablets, and also immersive VR headsets with WebXR-capable browsers, where models can be manipulated even with bare hands when supported by the device. The tool is accessible for free at https://molecularweb.epfl.ch/pages/pdb2ar.html.

Augmented reality, virtual reality and new age technologies demand escalates amid COVID-19

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is having a significant impact on healthcare, education, economics and general human well-being. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have experienced a tremendous increase in demand as they play an important role in avoiding travel, social contacts and providing adequate audiovisual communication and virtual presence. AR/VR is helping in the fight of this pandemic through their deployment in various crucial areas such as telemedicine, online education and training, marketing and healthcare monitoring. AR/VR provides resolutions for the distribution of antibiotics to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus. This paper discusses the demand for AR and VR as well as other notable new technologies explored recently to support the fight against COVID-19. The same technologies are in high demand, in the form of 2D-3D visualization and tracking software, flow and dynamic wearable headsets, potentially responsible for displaying the geographic location mostly affected with COVID-19.