ChemistryGO

Caffeine
Sulfur Hexafluoride (Bipyramidal)
Water (Bent)
Carbon Dioxide (Linear)

Inspiration

As students of chemical engineering, we are deeply interested in educating students about the wonderful field of chemistry. One of the most difficult things in chemistry is visualizing molecules in 3 dimensions. So for this project, we wanted to make visualizing molecules easy and interactive for students in addition to making it easy for teachers to implement in the classroom.

What it does

Aimed towards education, ChemistryGO aims to bring 3 dimensional molecular models to students in a convenient way. For example, teachers can integrate pre-prepared pictures of Lewis structures on powerpoints and students can use the ChemistryGO Android application with Google Cardboard (optional) to point their phones to the screen and a 3D ball and stick model representation will pop up. The molecule can be oriented with just a slide of a finger.

How we built it

The building of the application was split into three parts:

Front End Unity Development We used C# to add functions regarding the orientation of the molecule. We also implemented Vuforia API to pair 3D models with target images.
Database creation Vuforia helped us build a database of target images that were going to be used to pair with 3D models. Scripting was used with Chemspider to gather the list of target images of molecules.
Database extraction For 3D models, PDB files (strict typed file of 3D models, usually used for proteins) of common chemistry molecules were collected and opened with UCSF Chimera, a molecular visualization tool, and converted to .dae files, which were used Unity to produce the model.

Challenges we ran into

The fact that there were few simple molecules that were already in PDB format made it difficult to make a large database. Needing the image on screen for the 3D molecule to stay. Rotating the 3D molecule. Having a automated method to build the database due to the number of data points and software needed.