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posted by mrpg on Tuesday July 17 2018, @01:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-that's-useful dept.

Submitted via IRC for takyon

University of Bristol researchers have designed and tested a new virtual reality (VR) cloud-based system intended to allow researchers to reach out and "touch" molecules as they move — folding them, knotting them, plucking them, and changing their shape to test how the molecules interact. Using an HTC Vive virtual-reality device, it could lead to creating new drugs and materials and improving the teaching of chemistry.

[...] The multi-user system, developed by a team led by University of Bristol chemists and computer scientists, uses an "interactive molecular dynamics virtual reality" (iMD VR) app that allows users to visualize and sample (with atomic-level precision) the structures and dynamics of complex molecular structures "on the fly" and to interact with other users in the same virtual environment.

Source: Discovering new drugs and materials by 'touching' molecules in virtual reality


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:57AM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 17 2018, @03:57AM (#708199) Homepage
    well, apart from the fact that it looks like FoldIT dropped the ball waaaaaay back: https://fold.it/portal/node/277877
    And these guys ran with the VR idea, which the researchers claim "found that for complex 3D tasks, VR offers a significant advantage over current methods. For example, participants were ten times more likely to succeed in difficult tasks such as molecular knot tying."

    Not even implementing it in VR for the publish-a-paper-about-it props, and nerdy who-cares-if-it's-better-it's-cooler cred seems like a definite mistake by FoldIT.
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:05AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 17 2018, @04:05AM (#708201) Journal

    Not even implementing it in VR for the publish-a-paper-about-it props, and nerdy who-cares-if-it's-better-it's-cooler cred seems like a definite mistake by FoldIT.

    At the level of 2009 technology, I don't blame them for dropping it.
    Even Kinect wasn't released at that stage and manipulating the "stringy things to fold" using a Wii game controller is not that much easier than with mouse/keyboard.

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