Hello Emmanuel! We were actually talking about you just a few hours ago because we saw your posts about your VR class! It's awesome!

You can actually already move molecules with one hand if you use the "Move" mode (which moves stuff) instead of the "Navigate" mode (which moves yourself).

We decided to use both hands for navigation because we wanted the user to be able to scale as well as rotate / translate the view (7 degrees of freedom), and our tests have shown that this is what is familiar to many people (who use two fingers for scaling on phones). Using both hands and spreading arms / bringing arms closer changes your scale relatively to the molecules. When you move both hands without changing the distance between them you can rotate, translate, etc. Changing the scale in an intuitive way was really important to us to address many different scales as in the virus demo. In the frame below, the user height is around 0.1 microns:

while in this frame (inside the virus) the user height is about 1 nanometer:

(sorry for the video compression blur).

To move molecules instead of yourself, you use the thumbpad in "Move mode" (the two other thumbpad modes are "Add" and "Erase"), and you choose the selection filter that corresponds to what you want to move. This way, you can move a molecule with a single hand (or two molecules with two hands).

For example, in the Selection menu, choose the selection filter called "Structural models" as in the figure below:

Depending on your structures, you might want to select other levels (e.g. molecules, chains, etc., or the default "atoms and bonds").

Then, using the thumbpad, you can rotate / translate when you press on the thumbpad. This is demonstrated e.g. in this video where the user manipulates two carbon nanotubes at the same time to stick them together during interactive simulation. Each hand independently moves each nanotube.
.

You can have different modes in each hand (e.g. Add on the left hand, Move on the right hand, etc.).

I hope this helps. I'll be happy to talk more about it, as well as about extensions and applications.

Best,

Stephane Redon

Hello, when using the installer, you can check the box "Install older versions". The next step will give you the possibility of choosing the version you want, including 0.7.

Ah ok good. Yes SAMSON determines which importer to use based on the file extension.

Hello, thanks for your interest in SAMSON! Could you please log in to SAMSON Connect and go to My SAMSON / My Elements to check that you have not removed the Basic importers SAMSON Element that should be added by default? If necessary, here is the link to add it again: https://www.samson-connect.net/element/385fe362-adfd-ce55-95c0-4e63560efa29.html.

(I renamed the file you provided to methane.pdb and it worked here.)

Best,

Stephane

Hi Petr, thanks for the suggestion. We are thinking we might actually go the opposite route, i.e. hide these elements from My SAMSON / My Elements, so that they cannot be removed.

Hi Elisa, this is coming to 0.8.5 hopefully (or 0.8.6 at most), so in about two weeks or one month (we're doing a release every two weeks now). Precisely, we are now exposing a SBGControllerMove class (the one visible in the Move editor), so that developers can use this 3D widget for other applications. (0.8.4 should be released today).

Not at the moment, but some users have obtained parameterizations from https://atb.uq.edu.au/.

Hello, we're actually working on such a module ! (we had an early prototype in 2010, that we never released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDHqJjAfr_I)

Could you please tell us what was missing in existing software?

Dear Elisa,

the rotation editor only works on atoms. Does your custom model contain atoms? If yes, you might be able to connect to the model's structural signal and react to the ParticlePositionChanged event (see this tutorial for more information on signals: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/developers/latest/page_tutorial_center_of_mass.html). Then, you would deduce the change in the coordinate system by looking at the change of positions in the atoms. Note that this wouldn't work if there would be a non-rigid deformation applied by another editor.

If your custom model does not contain any atom, yes you will have to develop an editor to rotate it, and extending the current rotation editor will not help (for 0.8.0, we're looking to expose the underlying controller, for this type of situations).

Best,

Stephane

Hi @Radoslaw, are there 3D settings in your ATI driver that you could change? (e.g. do you have Catalyst Control Center?). Also, do you have only one graphics card (ATI), or also an Intel one?