[extropy-chat] visualizing nanoscale

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 02:14:52PM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:

> >         http://moleculardevices.org/howbig.htm
> 
> I love this stuff!  It would be nice though to see more than just a

Thanks!

> nanotech part, but to have a larger structure that was made out of parts.

I actually wanted to make a neon pump tesselation, and add a few
more components from biology (DNA, ribosome, protein crystal fragment)
and graphenes (diverse carbon nanotubes, fullerene, etc).

I will need to get a decent structure builder for assembling stuff from
components, though, or build large structures from scratch.

We already lamented a lack of tools; we definitely need something
to do the heavy lifting, especially up to mesoscale. I notice Zyvex
has wised up, and using voxel rendering for MEMS visualization.

> To do that it would probably be necessary to bypass modeling the whole
> thing as atoms, but instead to use larger shapes, with a texture map to
> represent the bumpiness of the surface.

It is not necessary to render everything as atoms, but I think it is
very necessary to represent stuff at full atomic scale. Custom sphere
rendering code scales very well (wireframe is cheap, anyway), and one 
can switch to voxel rendering when single atoms become difficult to 
hit with a mouse.

You only need 32 bit/atom, a few flags included, with current fat
desktops and next-generation small machines you can easily represent
up 10^9 atom systems, and render those in realtime, though. That's
at the threshold to mesoscale already.

Next generation machines and especially massively parallel next generation
machines can handle much larger structures.
 
> Imagine if you could see a respirocyte or a nanocomputer, at a variety
> of scales, with some cutaway views to show the inner workings.  Put one
> of those side by side with a virus or cell and you'd have a cool picture.

I absolutely agree. But our current tools are a pain to use, if you want
to build that (rendering is cheap allright).

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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http://moleculardevices.org         http://nanomachines.net
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