Stereoscopic cell visualization: from mesoscopic to molecular scale

Abstract

Cell visualization is an important area of scientific and educational visualization. There is already a number of astonishing animations illustrating the structural and functional properties of biological cells available in the Internet. However, these visualizations usually do not take advantage of three-dimensional (3-D) stereoscopic techniques. The stereoscopic visualization of the microcosmos cell-invisible to the human eye-bears high potential for educational as well as scientific approaches. Using open source tools it will be shown that it is possible to generate statically rendered as well as interactive stereoscopic cell visualizations. First, the 3-D modeling software Blender in conjunction with Schneider's stereoscopic camera plug-in will be used to generate a stereoscopic cell animation. While static renderings have an advantage in that the stereoscopic effect can be optimized for spectators, interactive stereoscopic visualizations always have to adjust and optimize the stereoscopic effect for users who can freely navigate through space. Cell visualization is paradigmatic for this problem because the scale differences from the mesoscopic to the molecular level account for a factor of 100,000. Therefore, two stereoscopic approaches of the CELLmicrocosmos project will be introduced, which address the stereoscopic scaling problem. The stereoscopic quality was positively evaluated by 20 students. Downloaded From: http://electronicimaging.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 05/15/2015 Terms of Use: http://spiedl.org/terms

Stereoscopic Space Map – Semi-immersive Configuration of 3D-stereoscopic Tours in Multi-display Environments

“…Here, our previously discussed dynamic interactive projection plane method is used which is especially relevant in case large virtual cells are visualized, bridging the molecular and mesoscopic scale with differences of up to a factor of 100,000 [12]. Figure 4.2 illustrates the static interactive projection plane method.…”

“…for stereoscopic motion pictures [9]- [11]. Previously we have introduced an approach to optimize the stereoscopic setting in interactive environments -the interactive projection plane S3D method [12]. The introduced methodology is especially relevant in case virtual environments with huge differences in scale have to be explored, such as biological cell models with scale variations of up to a factor of 100,000.…”

3D-Stereoscopic Immersive Analytics Projects at Monash University and University of Konstanz

“…Another important feature is the fact that the tour points can also be used to optimize the stereoscopic experience by using our previously introduced interactive projection plane method [28]. In this way, negative aspects, such as ghosting caused by crosstalk, can be minimized [29].…”

“…Visualization is a crucial part in the analysis pipeline for molecular structures [40], and stereoscopic visualization is a very important aspect supporting the structural analysis of their specific features [28]. Structural biologists were using stereoscopic technologies a decade before the commercial success of 3D technology around the year 2010.…”

“…As molecular structures are very complex -partly consisting of millions of atoms -stereoscopic vision is especially important when examining local features of the lipid neighborhood [28]. Figure 8 Center shows the CmME with the initially-generated structure using Lipid Packing Algorithms in S3D.…”