Developing a Virtual Reality Approach toward a Better Understanding of Coordination Chemistry and Molecular Orbitals

Abstract

A virtual reality (VR) session was introduced to an advanced inorganic chemistry class, a class available to junior and senior undergraduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles. The VR session helped the students to learn complicated aspects of metal coordination chemistry and molecular orbitals via an immersive three-dimensional experience.

VR in chemistry, a review of scientific research on advanced atomic/molecular visualization

“…In any case, to study a molecular system it is always necessary to prepare a data entry file, as well as the analysis of the results file. Several combinations of programs used for molecular editing and visualization, for example, PyMol with NumPy or PyLab (Romeo et al, 2020), UnityMol with Chimera (Dai et al, 2020), VMD, Rasmol, Chimera and Isolde (Ratamero et al, 2018), Molden, Avogadro, Gauss View, ChemOffice, Molekel, Chemcraft, etc.…”

“…The majority of research on practical experiences with VR relate to educational usage (Dai et al, 2020), endowing these activities with an attractive, game-like feel in recognition of gamification as a common activity among students, for example, learners enjoy the VR experience while they model basic hydrocarbon bonding molecules in Organic Chemistry (Edwards et al, 2019). Often, the design of virtual laboratories is related to video games strategies, this could be due to the fact that many young people know VR playing video games (Pallavicini et al, 2019).…”

“…), together with hardware like Processing Units GPU (O'Connor et al, 2018), in conjunction with Application-specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC), Cloud Computing platforms, and Distributed Computing Networks (Ibem, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, etc.). Programs such as UnityMol and ChimeraX, can be employed together, so UnityMol could be a good VR platform for teaching molecular orbitals, whereas UnityMol is interesting for fast VR sessions of data visualization (Dai et al, 2020). Additionally, there has been research on Molecular Dynamics Visualization software (MDV, PYMOLA and MinOmics), in combination with specific tools such as Hub for Immersive Visualization and eResearch, HIVE (Wiebrands et al, 2018).…”

Immersive Interactive Quantum Mechanics for Teaching and Learning Chemistry

“…refs. [12,29,30,32,33,[35][36][37][38][39][40]). For example, the structure of a large molecule with a complicated three-dimensional shape can easily be inspected from all possible angles, and the rearrangements of the individual atoms of this molecule as it undergoes a certain chemical reaction can be examined with great scrutiny.…”

A virtual alternative to molecular model sets: a beginners’ guide to constructing and visualizing molecules in open-source molecular graphics software

“…Avogadro [ 32 , 33 ], Chimera [ 34 ], Gabedit [ 35 ], IQmol [ 36 ], PyMOL [ 37 ] and QuteMol [ 33 ] o Online service for molecular graphics such as WebMO [ 38 ] and CheMagic [ 39 ] 3D/augmented reality (Advanced visualization techniques usually require both specific hardware and software for operation.) o 3D video glasses [ 40 , 41 ] o App on mobile devices [ 42 – 44 ] o Holographic projection [ 45 ] ● Commercial molecular model sets can be a costly one-time investment. As many pieces are included in a set to represent various atom/bond types, molecular model users usually spend a considerable amount of time for inventory inspection.…”