VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 30 2000 - 01:04:12 CST

Hi,
  I have a few suggestion on both your particular situation as well
as general comments about using multiple X11 displays that the general
VMD user community might find interesting/useful, particularly for
interactive "protein theatre" type applications of VMD.

Tell me a couple more things about your system. Is it designed to be
an immersive VR setup like the CAVE, where you're wearing a head tracker
with separately calculated projection matrices for each screen etc? Or is
it simply a "huge workspace" type setup, in which you're just using the
additional projectors as a means of getting more pixels and feet of projected
image size? If its a CAVE-like system, then you'll either have to use it
as a CAVE (and all that entails), or write the necessary code for your
system which does so, or wait until we have it working fully with FreeVR
etc. If its a "big workspace" type setup, then you can simply arrange
the placement of the graphics pipelines using ircombine on your Onyx, and
then modify the VMD startup script or the appropriate VMD startup
environment variables to get the graphics window running the way you
want it to.

If you want the graphics window and the GUI forms to run on differenct
X11 displays, you can do this by setting the DISPLAY environment variable
to the display where you want the GUI forms to go, and the VMDGDISPLAY
variable to be the display (or combined IR channels) where you want the
VMD graphics window to go. This is really nice when giving 3-D molecular
graphics demos, giving real-time interactive VMD presentations of your
molecules, MD trajectories, etc. We use this setup in our own lab locally,
and it is much more pleasant to view the molecules on a projected screen
without the clutter from the various GUI forms showing up too. Its really
something to see the molecule up on the screen hanging in space in front
of you in full-stereo, with no other distracting stuff on the projected
screen(s).

Please let us know if you have other questions about this stuff, and
I'm happy to answer questions others may have about the VMDGDISPLAY
feature, etc.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Oct 30, 2000 at 12:27:16PM +1100, Brendan O'Malley wrote:
> I've just installed vmd on an Onyx2 used to power a Virtual Reality room (technically
> a R3 relocatable reality centre). It installed seamlessly which was wonderful but at the
> moment only uses one of three possible graphics pipelines available. In this setup the scene is split in three and each third is displayed by a sperate projector. Is there a way
> of interfacing VMD with a multiple pipeline setup?
>
> I've looked throught the VMD cave refereneces, but I'm a bit unsure as
> to whether this refers specifically to a CAVE VR environment our more generally to the cave libraries.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help.
>
> Brendan O'Malley 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078