A newly designed VR software product strives to explain fundamental problems in biology and develop new treatments for diseases.
We are talking about vLUME. The program created by the scientists at the University of Cambridge in cooperation with 3-D image analysis software company Lume VR Ltd.
This software collects super-resolution microscopy data and transfers it into virtual reality. It can show you the structure various structures from individual protein to entire cell.
Super-resolution microscopy gets images at the nanoscale by using clever tricks of physics to get around the limits imposed by light diffraction. It opens the doors for observation of molecular processes as they happen.
"vLUME is revolutionary imaging software that brings humans into the nanoscale," says Alexandre Kitching, CEO of Lume.
"It allows scientists to visualize, question and interact with 3D biological data, in real-time all within a virtual reality environment, to find answers to biological questions faster. It's a new tool for new discoveries."
The software can load in multiple datasets with millions of data points. It can also find patterns in the complex data using in-built clustering algorithms. vLUME features image and video formats, so you can share the results of your research with your colleagues all over the world.
The team from the University is mostly using vLUME with biological datasets: neurons, immune cells, cancer cells, etc.
For example, they have been studying how antigen cells trigger an immune response in the body.
"Through segmenting and viewing the data in vLUME, we've quickly been able to rule out certain hypotheses and propose new ones," said Lee. This software allows researchers to explore, analyze, segment and share their data in new ways. All you need is a VR headset."