BioBrowser: A Framework for Fast Protein Visualization

This paper presents a protein visualization system called BioBrowser, which provides high quality images at interactive frame rates for molecules of extreme size and complexity. This is achieved by a shift in the tessellation approach: triangle meshes are not produced a priori on a ’just-in-case’ basis. Instead, tessellation happens ’justin-time’ given a certain camera position, image size and interaction demand. Thus, our approach is based on multiresolution meshes and on new extensions of graphics hardware. The paper shows how to reduce geometric data by using subdivision surfaces for ribbon structures and molecular surfaces and by using billboards instead of spheres consisting of triangles. It also shows how to use fragment shaders to create a three dimensional appearance and realistic sphere intersections. The combination of these approaches leads to an image quality not yet seen in interactive visualization environments for molecules of that size/complexity. All the above methods are combined to gain a high performance configurable visualization system on standard hardware.