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Scientific Visualization

LSB has over 20 years of experience in creating animated portrayals of abstract and time-varying phenomena. Most of the animations portray processes that were investigated using state-of-the-art ab initio or semi-empirical molecular computations for quantum and quasi-classical models.

The LSB Animation Engine is a proprietary animation driver, coupled with the POV-Ray image-rendering suite. The pairing produces a faithful representation of the data under investigation. Moreover, the images may be rendered at arbitrarily large formats.

Other animations portray innovative application of other, more widely known mathematical methods.

The use of animations can distill the results of many hundreds - or even many thousands - of hours of supercomputer calculations to a presentation that is readily understood by researchers, students, administrators, funding officers, and the general public.

LSB welcomes inquiries regarding the design of media for the visual portrayal of abstract phenomena for educational or research purposes.

This short animation shows how visual cues and motion create the illusion of a three-dimensional object.
This long video clip is an example of the use of animation to portray the results of a very large computational scientific problem. Specifically, it illustrates the intermediate stepwise results of a molecular modeling computation of the simulated annealing of the Closed Conformer Switch in ncd as T ranges from 0K to 800K and then back to 300K.

Most of this video shows only the structure of the Switch. When the Switch attains a magenta color, this represents the configuration at 300K, i.e., the start of the process. The successive colors represent the heating from 300K to 800K, and the maximal 800K temperature is represented by a bright yellow color. After the Switch cools back to 300K (shown again in the magenta color), the original configuration of the Switch is again shown in light gray for comparison to the new configuration. Finally, as the original Switch is faded out, the entire molecule is shown in its final structure.

(Note: This trailer has been reduced in dimension and quality in the interest of bandwidth requirements.)

For information about this calculation, see:
Todd J. Minehardt, Roger Cooke, Edward Pate, and Peter Kollman, A molecular dynamics study of the energetic, mechanistic, and structural implications of a closed phosphate tube in ncd, Biophys. J. 80, 1151-1168 (2001).

AMW_Logo Many of our scientific animations were produced under the moniker "Austin Molecule Works", and a number of clips that are intended for educational purposes are available at an archival website.

Since this material was created in 1999 and before, many of the original video clips are rendered in obsolete video file formats, and are incompatible with modern web browsers.

This material has been copied to this site, and the file formats and naming conventions of the animations have been upgraded to conform to modern browser standards for video presentations.

The updated material is available here.


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