VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 06 2011 - 13:39:44 CST

Dow,
  The android Java client we have been working on (slowly) is
meant as a way to use a smartphone as a 3-D pointer/interaction
device for controlling a VMD session running on a normal computer
(e.g. for presentations, meetings, etc).

At the present time we don't have any serious plans to port VMD itself
to Android. In order to run VMD on Android (even a limited subset),
the GUI and the OpenGL rendering code would have to be changed to
fit within the limitations of OpenGL ES and a touch screen interface.
I would also have my doubts about the phone's battery life while running
a big code like VMD. :-)

One way you could display models from VMD on a smartphone and rotate them
etc is to export the VMD scene as an X3D file (a feature of VMD 1.9) and
then view it using one of the WebGL-enabled browsers. One of the latest
beta versions of Firefox for Android is able to run WebGL, though I think
in our last test it didn't quite handle all of the javascript required
for X3DOM, which is a javascript X3D viewer that runs entirely in-browser
with no plugin. I expect WebGL to become much more popular in the next
few months as more browsers begin to support it. If you want to see an
example X3D object embedded in a web page, let me know and I'll send
you a test link to try out on your phone (requires a WebGL capable browser).

Jmol is undoubtably a better route for an interactive molecule viewer
if the phone browsers support it.

Cheers,
  John

On Sun, Mar 06, 2011 at 12:24:15PM -0500, Dow Hurst wrote:
> I read on the vmd-1.9 changelogs a blurb about an android Java client, but
> haven't found any other mention of this.A Is there any possibility of a
> 3D molecular viewer for android based on vmd?A Right now, for the android
> platform, there are no usable 3D protein or small molecule viewers. I'm
> looking for something that would show sidechains and ribbons for proteins
> but haven't found anything yet.
> Thanks,
> Dow 

-- 
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