A group of researchers in Russia implemented eye tracking in Narupa iMD and published their results in the Journal of Chemical Education last December.

The Narupa software framework is at the core of many projects in the lab. This software stack is what allows us to do multi-user interactive molecular dynamics in Virtual Reality. The main elements are the server and the Narupa iMD VR client. The server drives the molecular simulation, sends the trajectory that is generated to the clients in real-time, and synchronises data such as the avatar positions amongst the clients. The Narupa iMD client connects to the server from which it receives the frames from the simulation to display in Virtual Reality. We are actively working on the Narupa framework.

Molecular simulations can be computationally expensive. As we increase their length and time scales, running simulations becomes increasingly slow or requires increasingly more resources. Improved software and hardware reduce the cost, but these are not the only ways. Another way is to use a less expensive model. The Martini force field is such a model, and I have been involved in some of its recent developments.

We develop tools to view and interact with molecular simulations in Virtual Reality (VR). These tools let us see molecular systems in a different light to get a new intuition for them. In particular, it gives us a sense of how 3-dimensional and dynamic these systems are. So far, we have mostly gained qualitative insight into the biology and chemistry questions we had about molecular systems. Our new article, in collaboration with the University of Bristol and the University of Valencia, presents a new way to use trajectory generated in Virtual Reality as a base to compute free energies and get quantitative insight.