UnityMol prototype for FAIR sharing of molecular-visualization experiences: from pictures in the cloud to collaborative virtual reality exploration in immersive 3D environments

Motivated by the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has spurred a substantial flow of structural data, the use of molecular-visualization experiences to make these data sets accessible to a broad audience is described. Using a variety of technology vectors related to the cloud, 3D and virtual reality gear, how to share curated visualizations of structural biology, modeling and/or bioinformatics data sets for interactive and collaborative exploration is examined. FAIR is discussed as an overarching principle for sharing such visualizations. Four initial example scenes related to recent COVID-19 structural data are provided, together with a ready-to-use (and share) implementation in the UnityMol software.

Remote and Collaborative Virtual Reality Experiments via Social VR Platforms

Virtual reality (VR) researchers struggle to conduct remote studies. Previous work has focused on working around limitations imposed by traditional crowdsourcing methods. However, the potential for leveraging social VR platforms for HCI evaluations is largely unexplored. These platforms have large VR-ready user populations, distributed synchronous virtual environments, and support for user generated content. We demonstrate how social VR platforms can be used to practically and ethically produce valid research results by replicating two studies using one such platform (VRChat): a quantitative study on Fitts’ Law and a qualitative study on tabletop collaboration. Our replication studies exhibited analogous results to the originals, indicating the research validity of this approach. Moreover, we easily recruited experienced VR users with their own hardware for synchronous, remote, and collaborative participation. We further provide lessons learned for future researchers experimenting using social VR platforms. This paper and all supplemental materials are available at osf.io/c2amz.

How Do We Interact in Collaborative Virtual Reality?

Nonverbal interaction includes most of what we do; the interaction resulted from other means than words or their meaning. In computer-mediated interaction, the richness of face-to-face interaction has not been completely achieved. However, multiuser virtual reality, a computer-generated environment that allows users to share virtual spaces and virtual objects through their graphic representation, is a highly visual technology in which nonverbal interaction is better supported when compared with other media. Still, like in any technology media, interaction is accomplished distinctively due to technical and design issues. In collaborative virtual reality, the analysis of nonverbal interaction represents a helpful mechanism to support feedback in teaching or training scenarios, to understand collaborative behavior, or to improve this technology. This chapter discussed the characteristics of nonverbal interaction in virtual reality, presenting advances in the automatic interpretation of the users' nonverbal interaction while a spatial task is collaboratively executed.

Virtual Reality Digital Twin for a Smart Factory

This paper describes authors’ research in developing collaborative virtual reality applications as an interface for monitoring big data by creating a digital twin of the factory and sync the movement of virtual machines with the real ones. The platform allows an interactive reading of the sensor telemetry and processes data, maintenance information and access to a large technical library. For data acquisition and reports, a novel image data method was used. The data values that are encoded as pixel colors of images, using different encoding methods for each data type (text, integer, float, Boolean) are also encrypted using an image as a symmetric encryption key and are stored in the cloud in a time base folder structure, assuring a better data compression, security and speed, compared with the existing solutions based on JSON and NoSQL databases. The platform allows the remote access from the VR environment to the machines consoles and allows parametrization and remote commands.