Here's mixed reality taken to an atomistic level: the whiz kids within IBM's Second Life labs took the data describing a protein molecule generated on a supercomputer, then imported that into SL, where a scripted building engine dynamically recreated the molecule as a 3D model the size of an auditorium. IBM's epredator Potato (perched on the molecule in the video he took above) writes about this on the IBM-SL blog Eightbar, and points to an interview with two of its creators, Zha Ewry and Rez Tone, on SLNN. This is actually just one protein molecule in many-- in fact, there's an entire wiki devoted to them, with nearly twenty in-world now or with data available for deployment. The obvious practical application is in education, but it's easy to imagine engineering uses down the road, too-- for example, what if the data of this simulated molecule were linked up with nano-bots which could interact with the real one?
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Thanks for this post and the link to the wiki, I'm always giving SL demos to educators and this is great list to explore for biochem faculty.
Posted by: Fleep Tuque | Thursday, January 31, 2008 at 03:37 PM
There has been a lot of chemistry done on Second Life. For a brief synopsis look here: http://slusage.com/chemistry.asp
Posted by: Hiro Sheridan | Friday, May 02, 2008 at 05:50 AM