TCB Publications - Abstract

Michael Zeller, James C. Phillips, Andrew Dalke, William Humphrey, Klaus Schulten, Rajeev Sharma, T. S. Huang, V. I. Pavlovic, Y. Zhao, Z. Lo, and S. Chu. A visual computing environment for very large scale biomolecular modeling. In Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP), pp. 3-12. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997.

ZELL97B Knowledge of the complex molecular structures of living cells is being accumulated at a tremendous rate. Key technologies enabling this success have been high performance computing and powerful molecular graphics applications, but the technology is beginning to seriously lag behind challenges posed by the size and number of new structures and by the emerging opportunities in drug design and genetic engineering. A visual computing environment is being developed which permits interactive modeling of biopolymers by linking a 3D molecular graphics program with an efficient molecular dynamics simulation program executed on remote high-performance parallel computers. The system will be ideally suited for distributed computing environments, by utilizing both local 3D graphics facilities and the peak capacity of high-performance computers for the purpose of interactive biomolecular modeling. To create an interactive 3D environment three input methods will be explored: (1) a six degree of freedom "mouse" for controlling the space shared by the model and the user; (2) voice commands monitored through a microphone and recognized by a speech recognition interface; (3) hand gestures, detected through cameras and interpreted using computer vision techniques. Controlling 3D graphics connected to real time simulations and the use of voice with suitable language semantics, as well as hand gestures, promise great benefits for many types of problem solving environments. Our focus on structural biology takes advantage of existing sophisticated software, provides concrete objectives, defines a well-posed domain of tasks and offers a well-developed vocabulary for spoken communication.

Download Full Text

The manuscripts available on our site are provided for your personal use only and may not be retransmitted or redistributed without written permissions from the paper's publisher and author. You may not upload any of this site's material to any public server, on-line service, network, or bulletin board without prior written permission from the publisher and author. You may not make copies for any commercial purpose. Reproduction or storage of materials retrieved from this web site is subject to the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, Title 17 U.S.C.

Download full text: PDF (822.4KB), PS (45.1KB)