Show HN: Design and Simulate Molecules in Virtual Reality | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Design and Simulate Molecules in Virtual Reality

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66 pointsottomanbob12 comments

We started Nanome in 2015 as a basic molecular builder for modern VR hardware. Since then, we’ve integrated a variety of features for educators, researchers, and drug designers. Today, Nanome users can import, visualize, and modify macromolecular and protein structures via intuitive 3D interaction. Nanome is free on Steam, Oculus, and VivePort.

A few months ago, we shared CalcFlow, our open source VR graphing calculator, with HN. We received a lot of valuable criticism and are looking for more of the same.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15289766

Nanome is used at big-three Pharma companies and in classrooms in the University of California system. We also recently announced a partnership with the RCSB Protein Data Bank.

Nanome does not replace industry standard drug design tools like PyMol and MOE. Soon, Nanome will integrate with these tools via a plugin system, letting professionals bring VR interfaces into their established workflows.

http://nanome.ai

Very cool work, this reminds me of the nano engineer's workstations in Stephenson's Diamond Age.

I really think these sort of tools will get exponentially more powerful with some sort of force feedback. Imagine if you were able to feel the repulsive and attractive forces of the atoms while designing. Allowing the human mind to interact so directly with this world will enable molecule designers an intuition that I think is just not possible today.

Great point, we're implementing haptic feedback in newer builds. I never really thought of how meaningful it could be for describing forcefields. interesting...

I tried doing this with a novint falcon and reaxFF. I was able to push and pull on simulated molecules, but doing so gave me vertigo. Another problem was in this particular case the interesting phenomenon the molecule exhibited only occurred over orders of magnitude more than simulation time steps. Feeling the phenomenon would have necessarily mean feeling a lot of vibration due to thermal motion

I recall you did an ICO last year around this product (which looks amazing btw).

How do you feel about the blockchain/token angle now that the hype has subsided somewhat? Did the ICO make sense for you as a source of funding?

Contrary to most 2017 ICOs, you have a real product and serious research behind it, so I’m just very curious how you feel about the whole thing a year later.

hi pavlov! Our token sale was for a complementary platform, matryx. We are very serious about our token and have be chugging full steam ahead with development. Our public alpha is live on testnet and we have established some key partners in EDU including the UC system and Chinese Academy of sciences.

I can't speak for our org. as a whole re: the blockchain hype, but my general feeling is relief. It's now time to focus on what really matters: great projects + people. Sadly, we're an exception for continuing to build during the "winter."

Integrating Matryx into the Nanome interface is a huge priority for us.

http://matryx.ai http://alpha.matryx.ai

Very cool idea.

Using VR for something that might actually help to expand the human knowledge. This provides researchers with the ability to work with molecules in a way that is good for people with visual and spatial thinking.

How was your experience with getting listed on Steam, and integrating their API into your code? Are you using something like Unreal Engine for the interface?

Nanome was originally built on Unity. I can't speak to the experience with Steam from a dev perspective, but we did upload our original product to early access almost 3 years ago. The software has an entirely new codebase today. Submissions to other stores like Oculus were much more strenuous and heavily audited.

This is super cool. I am glad I live in the future.

Can it fold proteins?

Our current realtime minimization features are sufficient for smaller designs and adjustments, but binding site interactions and meaningful folds are still a ways out. In the future, Nanome will interact directly with leading folding tools.

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