[chimerax-users] Quest 2 Support?

[Tom Goddard]

Hi Blaine,

  Thanks for your suggestions.  I agree Oculus Quest 2 will be an important VR platform, possibly the most widely used VR headset.  It will support a link cable to a Windows PC like Oculus Quest does and that should allow running ChimeraX on a Windows PC while using Oculus Quest or Quest 2.  I don't have an Oculus Quest so I have not tested ChimeraX with the cable.  The drawback of course is you need to own a Windows PC with a powerful video gaming graphics card, and you have to have this extra cable.  Part of the reason the Oculus Quest has been so successful is that VR apps developed for Quest that run on its Android operating system don't need a PC, it is a standalone device.

  Unfortunately ChimeraX won't run on the Quest or Quest 2 without a Windows PC driving it.  There are a couple reasons for this.  ChimeraX depends on about 60 third-party libraries, millions of lines of code written by others, some of are not available for Android, for example running a molecular simulation with the OpenMM library.  Even if we leave out all the capabilities not available on Android, we wrote about 300,000 lines of code in Python and C++ that have many connections to the operating system.  I'd estimate the cost of porting ChimeraX to Android and maintaining it would be about 1 programmer for a full year, or about $200,000.  We don't have those funds and don't know anyone who would pay for it.  So for now ChimeraX VR is limited to Windows, Linux and macOS.

  I think your project to study the effects of VR on learning is interesting.  I have used VR for probably over 1000 hours and I have no doubt that it can be useful for education and training.  People are trying so many different uses.  I have talked with Hawkar Oagaz who has studied training people to play table tennis with VR (http://graphics.ucdenver.edu/virtual_reality.html <http://graphics.ucdenver.edu/virtual_reality.html>), and last week we talked to people working for NIAID director Anthony Fauci that are trying VR for training medical workers to put on personal protective equipment, gloves, masks, gowns, face shields in safe ways.  I think the main issue in all cases I have seen is clear, the software does not work well enough because not enough effort was put in.  Ultimately that is because it costs millions of dollars to make complex software work well, and it is not easy to get that kind of investment.

	Tom

> On Oct 1, 2020, at 12:15 PM, Blaine Hewitt <chunkypanda03 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>     Hello, my name is Blaine Hewitt. Now I know that you have stated previously that you have no intention of bringing support to the Oculus Quest. Which is completely understandable since I know that not only would you have to develop around a completely new Operating System but another CPU architecture and much much more I assume. But with the soon release of the Oculus Quest 2 and it's new XR 2 chip-set makes a pretty good argument for it. As this would allow for much easier use in education (as is what I am attempting to do with it). I think it will be even easier now to push updates with SideQuest <https://sidequestvr.com/> being relatively simple to setup. I know that another (Naome <https://blog.matryx.ai/nanome-on-quest-public-beta-is-now-available-b546321a04e9>) program is already available on the platform. But I do like your program a lot more since it is able to be used for free unlike Nanome Pricing <https://nanome.ai/pricing/> which is... as to say unappealing to public schools (such as mine). I was was also thinking (sorry if I am becoming annoying at this point) that if you do make a version of the Quest that you could make that GitHub branch available to the public. As for example while I may not be great at understanding complex protein structures I can help to make the whole experience more user friendly.
> 
> Anyways if you read this far thank you for taking time from your day to read this.
> 
>    If you want to know who I am, my name is Blaine I am in my senior year of High School (Waynecsd <https://wh.waynecsd.org/>). I have to do a project by the end of the year where I have to present an area of study I want to pursue and I decided to research the effects of VR on the human's ability to learn and retain information. Budget..... None
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