Browsing by Author "Miao, Haichao"

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    Interactive Exploded Views for Molecular Structures
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Sbardellati, Maximilian; Miao, Haichao; WU, Hsiang-Yun; Groeller, Eduard; Barisic, Ivan; Viola, Ivan; Kozlíková, Barbora and Linsen, Lars and Vázquez, Pere-Pau and Lawonn, Kai and Raidou, Renata Georgia
    We propose an approach to interactively create exploded views of molecular structures with the goal to help domain experts in their design process and provide them with a meaningful visual representation of component relationships. Exploded views are excellently suited to manage visual occlusion of structure components, which is one of the main challenges when visualizing complex 3D data. In this paper, we discuss four key parameters of an exploded view: explosion distance, direction, order, and the selection of explosion components. We propose two strategies, namely the structure-derived exploded view and the interactive free-form exploded view, for computing these four parameters systematically. The first strategy allows scientists to automatically create exploded views by computing the parameters from the given object structures. The second strategy further supports them to design and customize detailed explosion paths through user interaction. Our approach features the possibility to animate exploded views, to incorporate ease functions into these animations and to display the explosion path of components via arrows. Finally, we demonstrate three use cases with various challenges that we investigated in collaboration with a domain scientist. Our approach, therefore, provides interesting new ways of investigating and presenting the design layout and composition of complex molecular structures.
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    State of the Art of Molecular Visualization in Immersive Virtual Environments
    (© 2023 Eurographics ‐ The European Association for Computer Graphics and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) Kuťák, David; Vázquez, Pere‐Pau; Isenberg, Tobias; Krone, Michael; Baaden, Marc; Byška, Jan; Kozlíková, Barbora; Miao, Haichao; Hauser, Helwig and Alliez, Pierre
    Visualization plays a crucial role in molecular and structural biology. It has been successfully applied to a variety of tasks, including structural analysis and interactive drug design. While some of the challenges in this area can be overcome with more advanced visualization and interaction techniques, others are challenging primarily due to the limitations of the hardware devices used to interact with the visualized content. Consequently, visualization researchers are increasingly trying to take advantage of new technologies to facilitate the work of domain scientists. Some typical problems associated with classic 2D interfaces, such as regular desktop computers, are a lack of natural spatial understanding and interaction, and a limited field of view. These problems could be solved by immersive virtual environments and corresponding hardware, such as virtual reality head‐mounted displays. Thus, researchers are investigating the potential of immersive virtual environments in the field of molecular visualization. There is already a body of work ranging from educational approaches to protein visualization to applications for collaborative drug design. This review focuses on molecular visualization in immersive virtual environments as a whole, aiming to cover this area comprehensively. We divide the existing papers into different groups based on their application areas, and types of tasks performed. Furthermore, we also include a list of available software tools. We conclude the report with a discussion of potential future research on molecular visualization in immersive environments.