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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In order to focus my energy on open-source & community projects, I’ve recently decided to step away from Interactive Scientific, a company which I co-founded in 2013. I am now focusing intention on ArtSci International, a non-profit that supports open-source software tools for scientific simulation and aesthetic enquiry. Open innovation & community-values will form the bedrock of our ethos moving forward, taking inspiration from companies like Mozilla. It’s something I’m excited about, because a strong intellectual commons encapsulates the values, philosophy, and approach that has driven scientific enquiry for centuries. ArtSci’s mission will be focussed on supporting various community projects in order to enable cooperative learning. Stay tuned for more!

The last couple weeks have been lots of fun! With support from the Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Society, Arts Council England, and the EPSRC CHAMPS programme, I’ve been working on a project called “Figuring” at the Wickham theatre in the University of Bristol’s Department of Drama, with a talented team drawn across artistic, scientific, and technological practices. On 21 Sept, we showed Figuring to an audience of artists, producers, and technologists. This follows on from a previous showings of Figuring, for example at the Knowle West Media Centre, as part of their Commons Sense programme.
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Really excited to report that the open access Science Advances paper published by O’Connor et al. during the summer, entitled “Sampling molecular conformations and dynamics in a multiuser virtual reality framework” has since generated significant media exposure, having been picked up by a number of scientific media outlets. Nature, the New York Times, and the BBC’s “Science in Action” show (the VR piece begins 7 mins in) all contacted me in order to discuss the implications this work could have for nanotech research. It’s been exciting to witness the interest which the paper has generated. It certainly seems to be captivating people’s imaginations, and is attracting lots of attention by workers across academia & industry.

Working with academic colleagues from high-performance computing (HPC) and human-computer interaction (HCI), we recently published an open access paper entitled “Sampling molecular conformations and dynamics in a multiuser virtual reality framework” in the AAAS journal Science Advances. The paper described a scientifically rigorous, VR-enabled, multi-person, real-time interactive Molecular Dynamics (iMD) framework, which lets researchers use virtual reality to literally reach out & touch real-time molecular physics using cloud-mounted supercomputing.
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In collaboration with Bristol-based tech startup Interactive Scientific, more than 37,000 people had the chance to experience the acclaimed real-time interactive molecular dynamics art installation ‘danceroom Spectroscopy’ (dS) at the ‘We the Curious’ science museum in central Bristol.
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Good news! I was recently informed that I’ve been selected as the recipient of the 10th “Silver Jubilee” award from the molecular graphics and modelling society (MGMS), which aims to recognize contributions to the field of molecular modelling and related areas. As part of this prize, I will be invited to give a series of prize lectures. Further details to follow.

Chemistry World, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, has run a little feature outlining research progress we’ve been making as we explore real-time molecular simulation in virtual reality. The article tagline is brilliant: “Gaming-style tech is putting the fun into fundamental molecular simulations”. I love that. You can look at the article here.

During the first week of October, I attended the Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco, where I was invited to give a talk entitled “Collaborative Cloud-Based Virtual Reality for Scientific Research & Education”.
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