Democratizing interactive, immersive experiences for science education with WebXR

Bringing chemical structures to life with augmented reality, machine learning, and quantum chemistry

Visualizing 3D molecular structures is crucial to understanding and predicting their chemical behavior. However, static 2D hand-drawn skeletal structures remain the preferred method of chemical communication. Here, we combine cutting-edge technologies in augmented reality (AR), machine learning, and computational chemistry to develop MolAR, an open-source mobile application for visualizing molecules in AR directly from their hand-drawn chemical structures. Users can also visualize any molecule or protein directly from its name or protein data bank ID and compute chemical properties in real time via quantum chemistry cloud computing. MolAR provides an easily accessible platform for the scientific community to visualize and interact with 3D molecular structures in an immersive and engaging way.

Online tools to easily build virtual molecular models for display in augmented and virtual reality on the web

Several groups developed in the last years augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) software to visualize 3D molecules, most rather static, limited in content, and requiring software installs, some even requiring expensive hardware. We launched in 2020 moleculARweb (https://molecularweb.epfl.ch), a website that offers interactive content for chemistry and structural biology education through commodity web-based AR that works on consumer devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops. Among thousands of users, teachers increasingly request more biological macromolecules to be available, a demand that we cannot address individually. Therefore, to allow users to build their own material, we built a web interface where they can create online AR experiences in few steps starting from Protein Data Bank, AlphaFold or custom uploaded structures, or from virtual objects/scenes exported from the Visual Molecular Dynamics program, without any programming knowledge. The web tool also returns WebXR sessions for viewing and manipulating the models in WebXR-compatible devices including smartphones, tablets, and also immersive VR headsets with WebXR-capable browsers, where models can be manipulated even with bare hands when supported by the device. The tool is accessible for free at https://molecularweb.epfl.ch/pages/pdb2ar.html.