John E. Stone, William R. Sherman, and Klaus Schulten.
Immersive molecular visualization with omnidirectional stereoscopic
ray tracing and remote rendering.
2016 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing
Symposium Workshop (IPDPSW), pp. 1048-1057, 2016.
(PMC: PMC5063251)
STON2016A
Immersive molecular visualization provides the viewer with
intuitive perception of complex structures and spatial relationships that
are of critical interest to structural biologists.
The recent availability of commodity head mounted displays (HMDs)
provides a compelling opportunity for widespread adoption of
immersive visualization by molecular scientists,
but HMDs pose additional challenges
due to the need for low-latency, high-frame-rate rendering.
State-of-the-art molecular dynamics simulations produce terabytes of
data that can be impractical to transfer from remote supercomputers,
necessitating routine use of remote visualization.
Hardware-accelerated video encoding has profoundly increased
frame rates and image resolution for remote visualization,
however round-trip network latencies would cause simulator sickness
when using HMDs.
We present a novel two-phase rendering approach that
overcomes network latencies with the combination of
omnidirectional stereoscopic progressive ray tracing and
high performance rasterization, and its implementation within
VMD, a widely used molecular visualization and analysis tool.
The new rendering approach enables immersive molecular visualization
with rendering techniques such as shadows, ambient occlusion lighting,
depth-of-field, and high quality transparency,
that are particularly helpful for the
study of large biomolecular complexes.
We describe ray tracing algorithms that are used to optimize
interactivity and quality, and we report key performance metrics of the system.
The new techniques can also benefit many other application domains.
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