Historically, Autodesk has served three industries:
- Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC)
- Manufacturing
- Media & Entertainment
By serving these industries, I mean we deliver technologies that enable the future of making things, whether that be a building, mechanical part, or the latest blockbuster movie. In the process, we are leading the shift in the industries we serve to cloud-based technologies and business models. As part of serving those industries, we have developed a "large model viewing" technology that is associated with our cloud offerings. It is normally used for buildings and mechanical parts. It has "large" in its name in that it handles models that are larger and more complex than those handled by Autodesk Design Review.
We had a technology preview on Autodesk Labs where we leveraged that viewing technology for a different industry. To quote Steve Martin, "Hey, let's get small." 3D visualization of large and multi-scale biological data, from macro-molecular structures to whole organisms, is integral to building predictive models for biomedical research; however, existing industry standard desktop, plug-in, and web-based applications can easily push beyond the limits of advanced processing and rendering. Molecules are no longer discovered. They are designed.
The Autodesk Research Molecule Viewer and its visualization platform are designed to leverage cloud capabilities to overcome limitations of scalability, capability, accessibility, collaboration, and outreach for biological datasets. Layered on an extensible web-based visualization framework optimized for large 3D models and data, the Molecule Viewer streams in and visualizes translated data from the RCSB Protein Data Bank directly in the browser. The technology preview has ended. The technology has graduated from Autodesk Labs and is available as simply the Autodesk Molecule Viewer.
Celebrating getting small is alive in the lab.