Fantastic Voyage in AIMS: Navigating in the World of Atoms and Molecules

By Charles Xie

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Gamification is a strategy to engage and entice users by mimicking gaming experience. A goal of our AIMS platform is to create a serious game that can stimulate users' interest in exploring the world of atoms and molecules. We envision such a user interface to deliver immersive experiences for users to "witness" how atoms and molecules interact with one another to create the wonders that we see in the familiar macroscopic world. Our work was inspired by Fantastic Voyage — a 1966 Oscar-winning science fiction film about a submarine and its crew shrunk to a microscopic size and venture into the body of an injured scientist to save his life.

We took the first step to create a navigation mode in AIMS enhanced by visual cues such as a cockpit to view the molecular world on a first-person basis and a dashboard to control the position and orientation of the viewer perspective.

Live model above (view in full screen) — Chrome or Edge recommended

Click anywhere on the dashboard to activate the navigation mode. This mode allows you to move in six directions (up, down, left, right, forward, and backward), as well as rotating in six directions (pitch up/down, yaw left/right, and roll left/right). You can click the buttons on the dashboard to move or rotate one step at a time, or use the keys mapped to them to move or rotate continuously. Like in other games, AIMS uses the WASD keys to control the movement. For example, W/S control forward and backward movement and A/D control left and right movement. The Thrust slider can be used to adjust the power of the thrust — the higher the value, the faster the navigation speed. The three text fields on the dashboard can be used to specify the coordinates of a position to which you want to teleport.

The navigation mode can be applied to any type of project in AIMS. For example, the following window shows an immersive view of how water molecules move in a carbon nanotube. You can navigate to anywhere inside the nanotube to observe the motion of water molecules from any perspective. Notice that, in some browsers, the molecular dynamics simulation may temporarily pause when you press a navigation key.

Live model above (view in full screen) — Chrome or Edge recommended

Currently, this navigation mode is limited to a "ghost ship" mode, meaning that you can navigate through molecules unobstructedly.

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