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Zeus-Android (alpha version)
Technologies employed: Java,
Android, OpenGL ES (embedded systems)
About:
Mobile phones have enjoyed the
recent advances in processing power and the Android platform supports a JVM
(Java Virtual Machine) with OpenGL ES enabling the development of 3D
applications: Zeus-Android has used this technology to offer Molecular
Visualisation of Brookhaven Protein Databank files for Android devices.
Photos of Zeus-Android
(alpha) running on a Sony Xperia M2...
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Molecular
Visualisation on Android
The desktop based Zeus
molecular visualisation package had previously been ported to Java and
OpenGL and has since formed the basis for Athena
(Sparc64/x86 on Solaris).
This
most recent development sees an Android OpenGL-ES port of Zeus.
The first alpha version supports wire-frame rendering as well as 3D Bezier
ribbons, computation of Hydrogens and Hydrogen bonding and CPK/colouring
of residues by side-chain character (i.e. Acidic, Basic, Polar Uncharged,
Non-polar). PDB files can also be downloaded automatically from the
Protein Databank.
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OpenGL-ES
Having developed in OpenGL with both Object Pascal and Java, it seemed a
port of the Zeus
code-base from Java-OpenGL would be fairly seamless. Whilst true for the
Java classes and encapsulation of the molecular framework it was not the
case for the graphics rendering as OpenGL ES (Embedded Systems) does not
support glBegin/glEnd transactions and has no inherent support for GLUT
(GL Utilities) and GLUT objects such as gluSphere or gluCylinder. |
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Download/Availability
Zeus-Android is available via the Android Marketplace (Google Play) -- Download
Zeus-Android
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