Nanome on Quest Public Beta is Now Available!
Today, we’re very excited to launch the Public Beta of Nanome for Oculus Quest.
Ever since Oculus Connect 5, our team has fallen in love with the Oculus Quest. We know that the future of VR and XR, in general, will rely on all-in-one devices. Even though our primary focus is to help drug discovery teams in biotech and Pharma companies, at our core, we want to help everyone interact with and understand science better.
We strongly believe that devices like the Oculus Quest will accelerate these efforts by increasing the accessibility with more portable and affordable VR hardware.
Sideloading Nanome via SideQuest
Anyone with an Oculus Quest can now install Nanome through SideQuest. We recommend checking out these tutorials on how to use SideQuest. Sideloading without SideQuest is a bit harder, but the latest .apk of Nanome will be available through our website.
Oculus Quest Store
We would love to be on the Oculus Quest app store. At the moment, Oculus seems to have their focus set on gaming and entertainment. We have submitted a request to release our app through their store, so we’ll keep you updated when we get the opportunity to launch on the official Oculus store! If you don’t want to bother with Sideloading and SideQuest, no worries! We will still have our beta sign up available here. Please note that if you chose to download Nanome for your Quest this way, we’ll need to add your oculus ID email to our beta channel manually so there may be some delays. After this, you will be able to search for and download Nanome on the Quest app store.
Nanome Curie’s Evolution
Some of you may have been apart of our closed beta for Oculus Quest: Nanome Curie. Initially, we believed that what we developed for the Quest experience version Nanome might be different enough to warrant a separate brand. However, to our pleasant surprise, our excellent development team has had a few critical technical breakthroughs that enable a wonderful and similar experience to desktop VR systems. As a result, we’re discontinuing the Nanome Curie brand. Going forward, Nanome will represent our core software experience for all devices.
Key Technical Breakthroughs for Oculus Quest
Molecular Surfaces
Sadly because Quest doesn’t have a dedicated GPU, we had to depart from the strikingly beautiful GPU accelerated molecular surfaces we know and love on our desktop version. However, we have developed an analytical method to compute a more detailed molecular surface. Our surface algorithm for the Quest is a beta feature and will likely improve in the near future.
Integration with Nanome’s python-based API for plugins (AKA The Plug In System) for Molecular Energy Minimization and More
The energy minimization algorithm we leverage for desktop VR isn’t available on the Quest due to computational limitations. On top of that, we know that beyond basic energy minimizations, users want to have Nanome interface with other advanced computational solutions. These could include docking, molecular dynamics, cheminformatics, and other calculations. These computations traditionally can be computed on a large computing cluster or cloud services, separate from the computing device for VR.
Earlier this year, we rolled out the plugin system to our enterprise and select users to accomplish just this. We’re happy to announce that energy minimization is fully compatible through the plugin system with the Oculus Quest.
Through the plugin system, users can also access desktop files on their computers. This way, users can load custom structures as well as images and PDFs. Though the plugin system is currently unavailable to academic and app store users, we plan to open the plugin system availability to those users in mid-2020.
Quest vs Desktop VR
Although the Oculus Quest offers much more portability and affordability than desktop-based VR systems, there are some performance trade-offs. Currently, the main difference from the Quest version is the limitation of the total atom count in the scene. Quest users have been reliably able to load structures that contain about 2000 atoms. When the frame rate starts to slow down after loading in more than 2000 atoms, there will be a warning sign that will fade the workspace out. By contrast, Nanome’s desktop version can reliably load structures with 40k+ atoms with a GTX 1060. Users with more powerful GPUs have higher atom count limitations.
A personal note
I learned how to code at the height of the iPhone jailbreaking movement in 2009. Cydia and the iPhone Dev Team is one of the biggest reasons I’m here today, building Nanome. Admittedly, the technicalities and circumstances are drastically different between the Quest and the iPhone. That said, after almost exactly a decade later, I can’t help but feel the ‘unoffical app store’ similarities between the early days of the jailbreaking community and the community that’s currently sprouting from SideQuest. Although I never got around to it, it was my dream to someday publish an app on Cydia, and I think distributing an app on SideQuest in 2019 is the closest thing.
Potential therapeutic solutions are being designed in Nanome, and we hope to impact thousands of lives across the planet. With the Quest, we hope to get Nanome into more people’s hands. I’m super excited to be apart of this journey with the VR/XR community, and I can’t wait for you all to try Nanome for Oculus Quest.
