VisionMol: A Novel Virtual Reality Tool for Protein Molecular Structure Visualization and Manipulation.

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) Pub Date : 2025-03-17 DOI:10.1093/bioinformatics/btaf118

Xin Wang, Yicheng Zhuang, Wenrui Liang, Haoyang Wen, Zhencong Cai, Yujia He, Yuxi Su, Wei Qin, Yuanzhe Cai, Lixin Liang, Bingding Huang

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Abstract

Motivation: Virtual reality technology holds significant potential for applications in biomedicine, particularly in the visualization and manipulation of protein molecular structures. To facilitate the study of protein molecules and enable the state-of-the-art VR hardware, we developed a novel VR software named VisionMol, which allows users to engage in immersive exploration and analysis of three-dimensional molecular structures using a range of virtual reality platforms (such as Rhino X Pro, Meta's Oculus Quest Pro/3) as well as personal computers.

Results: Built on the Unity engine and programmed using C#, VisionMol incorporates custom scripts to enable a variety of molecular operations. Users can rotate, scale, and translate molecular models using gestures, controllers, or other input devices. Furthermore, VisionMol offers rich visualization and interactive features, including multi-model molecular display, distance measurement between molecular components, and molecular alignment and docking.

Summary: These capabilities facilitate a more intuitive understanding of molecular interactions and chemical properties. The real-time interactive effects and clear visual representations allow users to delve deeper into the relationships between molecular structures and their properties, thereby accelerating research progress and promoting scientific discovery. We believe that this VR-based protein molecule analysis has significant application value in several fields, including biomedicine, life science education, drug design and optimization, biotechnology, and engineering applications.

Availability: The code is at https://github.com/WangLabforComputationalBiology/VisionMol. The v1.1 code (for Oculus Quest) could also be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14705790. The v1.0 code (for Rhino X Pro) could also be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14865216. Detailed documentation could be found at https://visionmol.surge.sh/#/en-us/README.

Supplementary information: Supplementary are available at Bioinformatics online.

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