"I think it can't be understated how important it is to able to rotate, and move the playback forwards and backwards. It's almost like being able to hold the part in your hands, examine the reasoning behind its structure and "debug" your mental model of it by playing its operation back and forth."
Yes! I lived this problem as an XR designer at Nanome. The gap between what's in the minds of scientists discussing the models vs what the methods for showing data are displaying is still huge. The scale of the discussion is so large and small at the same time. Just amazing challenge but the new XR tech offers more possibilities for creating better representations of the higher dimensional data and the interaction complexity at target.
Interesting! Are you envisioning a tool that lets you highlight a group of cells that will differentiate to some later structure? I think that would be cool to play with.
From what I recall from a brief review of embryonic development years ago, was that there is a sort of fog of war because we limited by federal funding cutoff rules around handling fertilized human embryos.
In terms of the spatial complexity biology exceeds that of a watch or an engine at some point and before that it probably looks like “blobology” before - to narrow a term from cryo-EM - and thereafter exponentially increasing in complexity. Would make a lot of guess work. Cell systems are emergent behavior from genetic changes very hard to predict and engineer like a watch - yet it would be fascinating to see differential development within a species along an in silico mutagenic panel.
Yeah, basically. Tracing lineages backward and forward in time would be great. Even just seeing spatial patterns of gene expression over time would be very useful.
Great point; visualizations in biology are scarce. This is too bad because lots of biology - all of biology? - amounts to processes, events in time, interactions, chains of events, etc . The mind-boggling example is the development of an embryo. Time, time, time...illustration in 4 dimensions. I hope your post inspires illustrators to tackle the challenge! Thanks
What technologies are typically used for this? I used to do Flash animations and a little bit of work with 3D Studio Max and Unity 3D. But I haven't kept up with the tech at all. (And Unity seems to have threatened its customers with some horrid licensing deals.)
I'm probably pretty well situated to move in this direction once I'm done with my Masters, but I'd need to retool on whatever the latest tech packages are.
Someone took Goodsell's paintings and made a free app with a 3D model of a cell that you can rotate, zoom in, select different parts of the cell, and more https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cellwalk/id1627776848
That app might be the closest thing to what you are looking for that I am aware of. Maybe it would be worth reaching out to the guy who made it?
Gaussian splats should make this easier, and the real time AI enhancement of doodles should enable creating some of this in a timely manner. How much do you think people are willing to pay for this done well?
A HN commenter in 2021 put it best:
"I think it can't be understated how important it is to able to rotate, and move the playback forwards and backwards. It's almost like being able to hold the part in your hands, examine the reasoning behind its structure and "debug" your mental model of it by playing its operation back and forth."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27002602
Yes! I lived this problem as an XR designer at Nanome. The gap between what's in the minds of scientists discussing the models vs what the methods for showing data are displaying is still huge. The scale of the discussion is so large and small at the same time. Just amazing challenge but the new XR tech offers more possibilities for creating better representations of the higher dimensional data and the interaction complexity at target.
This is my North Star https://dynamicland.org/2023/Improvising_cellular_playgrounds_in_Realtalk/
Interesting! Are you envisioning a tool that lets you highlight a group of cells that will differentiate to some later structure? I think that would be cool to play with.
From what I recall from a brief review of embryonic development years ago, was that there is a sort of fog of war because we limited by federal funding cutoff rules around handling fertilized human embryos.
In terms of the spatial complexity biology exceeds that of a watch or an engine at some point and before that it probably looks like “blobology” before - to narrow a term from cryo-EM - and thereafter exponentially increasing in complexity. Would make a lot of guess work. Cell systems are emergent behavior from genetic changes very hard to predict and engineer like a watch - yet it would be fascinating to see differential development within a species along an in silico mutagenic panel.
Yeah, basically. Tracing lineages backward and forward in time would be great. Even just seeing spatial patterns of gene expression over time would be very useful.
Great point; visualizations in biology are scarce. This is too bad because lots of biology - all of biology? - amounts to processes, events in time, interactions, chains of events, etc . The mind-boggling example is the development of an embryo. Time, time, time...illustration in 4 dimensions. I hope your post inspires illustrators to tackle the challenge! Thanks
Drew Berry, Walter & Eliza Hall Institute, Melbourne
https://www.drewberry.com/images/2017/6/5/nucleosomes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Berry
Cool, Drew Berry looks very good! Hopefully he can do gastrulation.
What technologies are typically used for this? I used to do Flash animations and a little bit of work with 3D Studio Max and Unity 3D. But I haven't kept up with the tech at all. (And Unity seems to have threatened its customers with some horrid licensing deals.)
I'm probably pretty well situated to move in this direction once I'm done with my Masters, but I'd need to retool on whatever the latest tech packages are.
From: https://twitter.com/BCiechanowski/status/1387827101294686210
"I did the 3D models in Shapr3D with small post processing in Blender, animations are just done by hand"
Thanks! Though I'm not sure what "done by hand' means, as they're digital and I associate 'by hand' with papers and pencils.
David S. Goodsell has good visualisations of various cells, viruses, etc. which I
find both beautiful and opened my eyes to how complex cells are https://pdb101.rcsb.org/sci-art/goodsell-gallery
Someone took Goodsell's paintings and made a free app with a 3D model of a cell that you can rotate, zoom in, select different parts of the cell, and more https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cellwalk/id1627776848
That app might be the closest thing to what you are looking for that I am aware of. Maybe it would be worth reaching out to the guy who made it?
Gaussian splats should make this easier, and the real time AI enhancement of doodles should enable creating some of this in a timely manner. How much do you think people are willing to pay for this done well?
Is this something AI video generation could do ?