LogInBiology is right on your iPhone.
Image credit: Tim Davison
Imagine if you had a microscope on you all the time, wouldn't it be wonderful? While I'm not sure there is a convenient solution for this right now, you can study bacteria cells from your iPhone as graphics programmer Tim Davison has proven with his latest showcase.
He imported the cell together with lipids and rendered it using the new Angstrom rendering engine. Davison says he hasn't written an article about the engine yet, so I assume it's his own project.
You can see every tiny detail in this cell, which could be used for educational purposes. Davison explained that it works in real time and was rendered with a visualizer for iPads, iPhones, and Macs.
The 3D model was taken from Martina Maritan, which is available on GitHub, so check it out and try it for yourself. To learn more about it, read the paper Building Structural Models of a Whole Mycoplasma Cell by Martina Maritan, Ludovic Autin, Jonathan Karr, Markus W. Covert, Arthur J. Olson, and David S. Goodsell here.
When asked about the slice effect, Davison replied: "The slice effect culls the atoms with a bounding box check. I cull whole groups (instances) early. There are multiple rendering paths (depends on HW features). Compute discards atoms outside BB. Vertex shader generates degenerate triangles which are efficiently discarded by HW."
We might see even more exciting projects soon as Davison wants to create an application combining the existing research.
"My goal is to release an app that takes users [on] an incredible scientific journey through life's microscopic machinery: zoom from a whole cell down to the individual atoms of DNA molecules! It's going to be amazing for science education and science communication," he told us.
There is no release date for it yet, but it will be available on iPhones and iPads with an A12 or better GPU.
Meanwhile, you can find more fun renders on the creator's X/Twitter.
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