Development of a visualization application for molecular information using smartphones and tablets

Abstract

Leveraging rapid pervading smartphones and tablets equipped with camera and internet communication can be expected to contribute various advantageous effects on the chemical research and education. A molecular visualization application for such mobile Android devices, "TUTmol", can display the 3D molecular structure with various drawing methods and is possible to operate the scaling and rotation by touching on the screen directly. In this study, as one of the TUTmol enhancements, a character recognition technique using the augmented reality (AR) technology has been introduced. By this new function, TUTmol can recognize PDBID specified by four alphanumeric AR markers, automatically download the corresponding PDB file via Internet, and then visualize the molecules with the PDBID. The management function with respect to the lists of many molecular structure files downloaded has been introduced.