(Click here to see bigger screenshot)Based on work in progress by the UnityMol team & Marc Baaden
We put together a WebGL port of UnityMol accessible through baaden.ibpc.fr/umol/webgl. It should be fully functional, although compatibility issues have been observed with Safari on Mac. Should you experience problems under Safari (typically loading a PDB does not do anything), please try Firefox or Chromium which are reported to work fine on Mac.
(Click here to see bigger screenshot)
Here we have used UnityMol, a molecular graphics program developed with the Unity3D game engine, to (almost automatically) generate a WebGL port as one of the build platforms. A few modifications were necessary and could be implemented thanks to Xavier Martinez.
Conveying the 3-dimensional complex shapes of molecules is a major issue. Here we have used UnityMol to generate shareable 360 degrees stereoscopic 3D molecular panoramas. We used a virtual reality setup where an Oculus Rift head-mounted display allows the user to precisely tune the viewpoint in UnityMol and trigger the generation of the panorama. The panorama can then be shared for many platforms and headsets through VRchive.
Developing shaders for molecular graphics, and in particular web-compatible ones for a variety of platforms, is a tough task. As described in break-out topic 2. below, we suggest to use our HyperBalls shaders as a good starting point, in particular because a single shader allows to reproduce many of the common representations. Here is an example of a few representations derived for a given protein with the single shader by varying parameters such as shrink factor and radii.
Convergence of traditional web with new platforms such as VR HMDs
The web in a very general sense is moving extremely fast. Booming new devices such as HMDs Google Cardboard, Gear VR, Hololens, etc. may merge into the Internet of things/web space and require thinking beyond just the classical browser. This is particularly important for molecular graphics, where the immersive 3D VR experience adds much to understanding the complex datasets.
Shaders for the web.. oh my - we need a free community reference implementation!
3D graphics on the web typically involves coding GPU shaders. The technical conditions for this are evolving very fast and vary much upon different hardware devices. It is a nightmare to maintain, debug, keep up to date a given shader. The community should work together to provide a reference implementation that will be maintained and refined collectively, thus minimizing the efforts to support various platforms etc. Furthermore, keepting the number of shaders wrt the desired molecular representations low is very desirable. A suggestion would be to start from our free hyperballs shader, as it provides - in a single shader - various standard representations (CPK, licorice, spacefill..). Our shader is already implemented in several tools, among which unitymol, NGLViewer, a standalone OpenGL implementation..
Standards for web molecular graphics needed! In a broad sense
Another break-out topic proposed to standardize user interface. I actually think the core molecular graphics should also be standardized, e.g. define a minimal common set that we agree on with respect to representations, color codes etc. and their parameterts. That doesn't mean you cannot implement your own flavor, but having a minimum set that a user can rely on to find in any compatible viewer would be a great step forward.
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(c) 2016 / UnityMol team & Marc Baaden
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