Lenses in modern consumer HMDs introduce distortions like astigmatism: only the center area of the displayed content can be perceived sharp while with increasing distance from the center the image gets out of focus. We show with three new approaches that this undesired side effect can be used in a positive way to save calculations in blurry areas. For example, using sampling maps to lower the detail in areas where the image is blurred through astigmatism, increases performance by a factor of 2 to 3. Further, we introduce a new calibration of user-specific viewing parameters that increase the performance by about 20-75%.

MOTIVATION: Web-based workflow systems have gained considerable momentum in sequence-oriented bioinformatics. In structural bioinformatics, however, such systems are still relatively rare; while commercial stand-alone workflow applications are common in the pharmaceutical industry, academic researchers often still rely on command-line scripting to glue individual tools together. RESULTS: In this work, we address the problem of building a web-based system for workflows in structural bioinformatics. For the underlying molecular modelling engine, we opted for the BALL framework because of its extensive and well-tested functionality in the field of structural bioinformatics. The large number of molecular data structures and algorithms implemented in BALL allows for elegant and sophisticated development of new approaches in the field. We hence connected the versatile BALL library and its visualization and editing front end BALLView with the Galaxy workflow framework. The result, which we call ballaxy, enables the user to simply and intuitively create sophisticated pipelines for applications in structure-based computational biology, integrated into a standard tool for molecular modelling. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: ballaxy consists of three parts: some minor modifications to the Galaxy system, a collection of tools and an integration into the BALL framework and the BALLView application for molecular modelling. Modifications to Galaxy will be submitted to the Galaxy project, and the BALL and BALLView integrations will be integrated in the next major BALL release. After acceptance of the modifications into the Galaxy project, we will publish all ballaxy tools via the Galaxy toolshed. In the meantime, all three components are available from http://www.ball-project.org/ballaxy. Also, docker images for ballaxy are available at https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/anhi/ballaxy/dockerfile/. ballaxy is licensed under the terms of the GPL.

Today, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are becoming more powerful and exhibit enhanced 3D graphics performance.However, the overall computing power of these devices is still limited regarding usage scenarios like photorealistic gaming, enabling an immersive virtual reality experience or real-time processing and visualization of big data.To overcome these limitations application streaming solutions are constantly gaining focus.The idea is to transfer the graphics output of an application running on a server or even a cluster to a mobile device, conveying the impression that the application is running locally.User inputs on the mobile client side are processed and sent back to the server.The main criteria for successful application streaming are low latency, since users want to interact with the scene in near real-time, as well as high image quality.Here, we present a novel application framework suitable for streaming applications from high-end machines to mobile devices.Using real-time ETC1 compression in combination with a distributed rendering architecture we fully leverage recent progress in wireless computer networking standards (IEEE 802.11ac) for mobile devices, achieving much higher image quality at half the latency compared to other inhome streaming solutions.

Understanding protein structures is a crucial step in creating molecular insight for researchers as well as students and pupils. The enormous scaling gap between an atomic point of view and objects in daily life hampers developing an intuitive relation between them. Especially for high school students, it can be difficult to understand the spatial relations of a protein structure. Due to lack of direct imaging techniques, molecules can only be explored by studying abstract molecular models. Here, the use of Augmented reality (AR) techniques has proven to strongly improve structural perception. In this work we present ProteinScanAR, an augmented reality framework for biomolecular education that allows connecting virtual and real worlds intuitively, and thus enables focusing on the scientific or educational content. Special attention was taken to guarantee implementational and technical requirements as general and simple as possible to alleviate application in nonexpert computer settings. The ProteinScanAR framework is freely available under the GNU Public License (GPL).

BACKGROUND: The Biochemical Algorithms Library (BALL) is a comprehensive rapid application development framework for structural bioinformatics. It provides an extensive C++ class library of data structures and algorithms for molecular modeling and structural bioinformatics. Using BALL as a programming toolbox does not only allow to greatly reduce application development times but also helps in ensuring stability and correctness by avoiding the error-prone reimplementation of complex algorithms and replacing them with calls into the library that has been well-tested by a large number of developers. In the ten years since its original publication, BALL has seen a substantial increase in functionality and numerous other improvements. RESULTS: Here, we discuss BALL's current functionality and highlight the key additions and improvements: support for additional file formats, molecular edit-functionality, new molecular mechanics force fields, novel energy minimization techniques, docking algorithms, and support for cheminformatics. CONCLUSIONS: BALL is available for all major operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and MacOS X. It is available free of charge under the Lesser GNU Public License (LPGL). Parts of the code are distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL). BALL is available as source code and binary packages from the project web site at http://www.ball-project.org. Recently, it has been accepted into the debian project; integration into further distributions is currently pursued.