This is some fun stuff that we’ve been building in the Intangible Realities Laboratory! This video shows my perspective as I tie a knot in 17-Alanine using the Narupa framework while wearing the new customized Etextile VR glove prototype designed by Becca Rose & Rachel Freire.
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Sounding the gong & ringing the bells the moment we set the project free!

After nearly three years of research & development, I’m happy to announce that we have finally open sourced our multi-person, virtual-reality enabled, real-time simulation framework. It lets groups of researchers go into VR, and touch molecular objects as if they were tangible objects. Our working name for the project is ‘Narupa’, which we arrived by combining the prefix ‘nano’ and the suffix ‘arupa’. Wikipedia explains how arūpa is a Sanskrit word describing non-physical and non-material objects. It seemed to us a good concept for describing what it’s like to interact with simulated nanoscale objects. It’s still a name-in-progress, so let us know how you find it.
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