Optimised Molecular Graphics on the HoloLens

Abstract

The advent of modern and affordable augmented reality head sets like Microsoft HoloLens has sparked new interest in using virtual and augmented reality technology in the analysis of molecular data. For all visualisation in immersive, mixed-reality scenarios, a sufficiently high rendering speed is an important factor, which leads to the issue of limited processing power available on fully untethered devices facing the situation of handling computationally expensive visualisations. Recent research shows that the space-filling model of even small data sets from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) cannot be rendered at desirable frame rates on the HoloLens. In this work, we report on how to improve the rendering speed of atom-based visualisation of proteins and how the rendering of more abstract representations of the molecules compares against it. We complement our findings with in-depth GPU and CPU performance numbers.