cellVIEW

CellVIEW is a new tool that provides fast rendering of very large biological macromolecular scenes and is inspired by state-of-the-art computer graphics techniques. CellVIEW is implemented in a free-to-use game engine, unity3D, and it is therefore publicly available to anyone. Because we utilize a game engine as development platform, we are able to release and deploy our tool faster, since our project only consists of a few scripts and shaders. We are then released from the burden of maintaining a complex software solution and from tedious deployment constraints. Additionally, since more people in the community are getting familiar with these engines, we ensure a maximum level of reproducibility among other researchers too, thus breaking the barriers caused by heterogeneous toolset usage across research departments. CellVIEW provides fast rendering by introducing new means to efficiently reduce the amount of processed geometries. CellVIEW is unique and has been specifically designed to match the ambitions of structural biologist to model and interactively visualize structures comprised of several billions atoms, which corresponds to sizes of small bacterial organisms.

CellVIEW is the fruit of a collaboration with Mathieu Le Muzic and Ivan Viola from the Vienna University of Technology.

Release Build running on windows 64bits with a decent graphics card can be found here. Simply unzip the archive and execute cellVIEW.exe.