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Molecular Rift: Virtual Reality for Drug Designers

Author

Summary, in English

Recent advances in interaction design have created new ways to use computers. One example is the ability to create enhanced 3D environments that simulate physical presence in the real world a virtual reality. This is relevant to drug discovery since molecular models are frequently used to obtain deeper understandings of, say, ligand protein complexes. We have developed a tool (Molecular Rift), which creates a virtual reality environment steered with hand movements. Oculus Rift, a head-mounted display, is used to create the virtual settings. The program is controlled by gesture-recognition, using the gaming sensor MS Kinect v2, eliminating the need for standard input devices. The Open Babel toolkit was integrated to provide access to powerful cheminformatics functions. Molecular Rift was developed with a focus on usability, including iterative test-group evaluations. We conclude with reflections on virtual reality's future capabilities in chemistry and education. Molecular Rift is open source and can be downloaded from GitHub.

Publishing year

2015

Language

English

Pages

2475-2484

Publication/Series

Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling

Volume

55

Issue

11

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

The American Chemical Society (ACS)

Topic

  • Human Computer Interaction

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1549-960X