BUILDER, AN INTERACTIVE MOLECULAR CONSTRUCTION UTILITY - STRUCTURAL MODELING USING VIRTUAL-REALITY ON THE WEB

In this paper we discuss and show how virtual reality (VR) working ove r the World Wide Web (WWW) can be used by chemists and biochemists as an extremely powerful tool in analyzing data and disseminating informa tion and for interactive learning. Examples are presented of how VR is being used to investigate and visualize otherwise complex data. The p rogram Builder v1.2, which is an interactive WWW program that illustra tes the integration of Web and VR technologies, is described. The VRML language is used to build these virtual realities and is an acronym f or the Virtual Reality Modelling Language. VRML was developed original ly by Gavin Bell, Anthony Parisi and Mark Pesce and is based upon Sili con Graphics, Inc. successful Open Inventor graphics language. It is u sed to describe scenes that are displayed within a VRML viewer. But VR ML is not an ordinary graphics language because it was designed to wor k within the World Wide Web by including aspects of a hypertext langua ge. Thus objects in a scene may be hyperlinks to other virtual worlds, WWW pages or MIME types, allowing the viewer to navigate the Internet in a virtual reality and it is this aspect that is explored here in r elation to chemistry. Builder v1.2 is an on-line utility to create cus tomized, 3-D models of membranes using a WWW forms interface and was o ne of the very first examples of interactive scene creation with VRML. The user may choose components to go in the membrane from a range of proteins, cholesterol or a glycoprotein and then specify their locatio n in the membrane. The 3-D scene may be supplied at several levels of detail, including a full sphere representation suitable for high-end w orkstations, and a simple, minimum-rendering format ideal for PCs. The coordinates of the components may be downloaded in PDB format; the VR ML scene has the components all hyperlinked to Web pages describing th eir function. In conclusion, VRML provides a medium through which data that is too difficult to portray in 2-D may be analyzed and published . This illustrates clearly the benefits of the Internet as a future sc ientific publishing medium and a repository for supplementary and enha nced material to traditional printed journal information.