[chimerax-users] VR and optional functions

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Matthias,
Bear in mind that Chimera has had >15 years of development, and ChimeraX is not yet in beta release!   So rather than a “sister” it is more like an extremely promising baby, with new powers compared to its mature predecessor.  :-)

Regarding the “active for motion” stuff — it’s not exactly the same, but in ChimeraX you can use a mouse mode to translate or rotate only the model(s) with some part selected. The icons on the left of the main window set right-button mouse mode, or you can use the “mousemode” command to set the functions of other buttons or scrolling.
<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/tools/mousemodes.html>
<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/mousemode.html>

Otherwise, I can’t answer in detail other than to say: lab resources permitting, of course we do intend to significantly expand ChimeraX functionality and the richness of its interfaces.  We tried to explain this situation/intent in the download page.
Best,
Elaine
----------
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. 
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco


> On Oct 25, 2017, at 10:39 PM, Matthias Wolf <matthias.wolf at oist.jp> wrote:
> 
> Hi Tom et al,
>  
> Great job on chimeraX!
> The rendering engine is incredible.
>  
> I have tried to view our cryo-EM volumes in VR with a new HTC Vive – it’s amazing and it works really well!
> ChimeraX supporting VR was one of the reasons for me to buy the Vive. Thank you!
>  
> Now I haven’t used chimeraX before (I have used chimera since many years).
> I understand that the program is still work in progress. However, I am really missing some of the nice functions of chimera that make it so useful with a “clicky” interface  - e.g. color surface by radius or by pdb properties, segmented isocontoured maps, clipping planes, subvolumes, combined shaded and wireframe surfaces, biological assembly, etc – I find these functions very useful and there don’t seem to exist any command line options for this, or I just haven’t studied them enough yet.
>  
> Many of the existing menus in chimeraX have a fraction of the functionality of their sister program chimera. E.g. volume viewer, model panel, side view – I still have not figured out how to activate only one of several objects for rotation, when in chimera a click on the activate check box in the model panel does that (there is no active checkbox in the model panel of chimeraX and I couldn’t find a command to activate an object). It would be nice if one could simply grab an object in VR and rotate by itself it instead of the entire scene.
>  
> Do you have a plan to add or port some of these beloved GUI functions from chimera into chimeraX?
> Could they be added by copying python modules from chimera? 
> 
> It would be great, if one could press a button in VR on the hand controller to display the menu and select functions “by virtual laser pointer”. This could preserve the development effort that went into the GUI design of chimera by reusing it in chimeraX as an identical projected 2D menu in VR and it would prevent having to take the goggles off for simple model adjustments.
>  
> Best regards,
>  
>    Matthias