By Bio-IT World Staff

September 4, 2018 Nanome has launched its virtual reality platform for anybody interested in playing around with molecules, the company said. The platform includes a free tier on the Oculus VR Marketplace.

Nanome develops applications for experimentation, collaboration, and learning at the nano-scale by leveraging leading VR hardware like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive to create immersive virtual workspaces. Users can visualize, design, and simulate molecules, proteins, and more.

“Nanome is a completely new build of the Nanome software suite, integrating our professional, educational, and hobbyist tools into one, unified codebase,” Adam Simon wrote on the Nanome blog. “This new release fuses the ultra-friendly interfaces of nano-one and CalcFlow with the robust feature-set and power of NanoPro.”

Nanome Personal is free. Subsequent tiers include Nanome Plus ($2.99/month), Nanome Pro ($99/month), and education and enterprise tiers. These tiers come with “professional-specific features and integrations,” Simon wrote.

Award Winner

Nanome Pro won the attention of the Bio-IT World Best of Show judges in May at the 2018 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, taking home the top prize in the Data Exploration & Visualization category.

Nanome lets users import molecular structures from a local machine or an online database such as RCSB or DrugBank, and manipulate molecular structures by literally grabbing, rotating, or enlarging the area of interest with their hands and a virtual reality headset. Users can apply different representations to their selection of atoms, residues, chains, or proteins such as stick, wire, ball & stick, or Van der Waals, and then measure distances and angles between atoms.

Users can export molecular structures to PDB and invite other researchers to collaborate with or without virtual reality hardware. Multiple users can present and collaborate in the same virtual environment to demonstrate proposals or compare before and after results.

The tool presents, “science as a video game, quite good as a video game!” one of the Best of Show judges commented. “It wasn't just the fact that you can play with it,” another said. “You can collaborate in 3-D or 2-D and actually see what people are seeing!”