VMD-L Mailing List

From: Dudo (dudomail_at_gmail.com)
Date: Wed Mar 09 2011 - 12:27:40 CST

Hi again,

thanks for the nice post.

well, as for the 3D projecting device I have seen some time ago
one called heliodisplay (www.heliodisplay.com). it projects picture
in the air and it has also an interactive mode, where you can literally
move and manipulate objects hanging in the air.

as for new pointing devices, I thing the old good computer mouse still comes
as the most handy soluion. and there have been attmepts to replace it..
do you remember 3D mouses in the late 90's, trackbals, touchpad, IR pens
etc.

also when you build an atomic model, you need an accuracy of say 0.1 A, so
it's necessary to calculate it. also big numbers of particles usually
present
in a model should be considered, so computer does a good part of work
itself.

well, I think in final result using the computer mouse is physically less
hard. do you remember the scene from the movie Minority Report, where
Tom Cruise searches a file on the interactive screen doing twirls with
his hands and fingers? wow, so I can say, one should need to be really
physically fit doing this at work whole day, otherwise you could get
a bit of a muscle ache.

as for the elegant use in presentations I'm not so convinced as well.
to interact with the 3D sensor you would have to be doing big gestures and
your body language is gone. one may think, why is this guy waving his
hands on me?.... ^_^

oki, these are just my suggestions, keep it on!

Dudo

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 5:58 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
> There's a group on campus here at UIUC that has been doing interesting
> things with range cameras (the Kinect is one such example). One of the
> most interesting things they did so far was to superimpose the user
> into the VMD scene, so that the user could pierce the atoms with their
> hand, and otherwise see themselves projected into the 'space' of
> the molecule. This was used in a projector environment like you
> describe and was a small test program they wrote about 9 months ago.
>
> Subsequent to that, I wrote them some code to let them get the
> VMD Z-buffer data so that one could composite the range image and
> the VMD visualization more perfectly. It was interesting to play
> around with, but to make "serious" use of it would require much more work.
>
> Probably the most interesting usage from my point of view would be to
> use this setup for the purposes of making video presentations where
> the speaker is "in the molecule" and can walk around within the
> 3-D world. Beyond that, I'm not sure that the Kinect offers anything
> that we couldn't already do as well or better with other types of
> 3-D tracking devices such as the magnetic trackers typically used in
> the CAVE and similar environments (Polhemus, Flock-of-birds, etc).
> The main advantage of the Kinect and similar range cameras is that they
> are a lot cheaper than the 6DOF magnetic tracking systems...
>
> In terms of interacting with the VMD scene for a more normal use case,
> I think that the Android cell phone client we've been prototyping may
> be more usable for everyday meetings and the like, and particularly for
> multiple simultaneous users.
>
> If people have ideas on how they'd like to use things like the Kinect
> or the Android cell phone client to control VMD, we'd love to hear
> about them. Although we've been looking into these things in our free
> time, we definitely haven't thought of everything...
>
> Cheers,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 09, 2011 at 12:30:16PM +0100, Olaf Lenz wrote:
> > Hi everybody!
> >
> > During the last months, there has been considerable hubbub about
> > Microsoft's Kinect 3D camera and the possibilities of it.
> >
> > I think that it should be a great input device if you use a projector to
> > visualize molecules, as it would allow real 3D manipulation of the scene.
> > Did anybody already think about how one could use it to control VMD? Or
> > did anybody already start working on it? If so, I would be very
> > interested. Otherwise, I could possibly start with it...
> >
> > Olaf
> >
> >
> > --
> > Dr. rer. nat. Olaf Lenz
> > Institut für Computerphysik, Pfaffenwaldring 27, D-70569 Stuttgart
> > Phone: +49-711-685-63607
>
>
>
> --
> 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
> 

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