What is MICE ?The Molecular Interactive Collaborative Environment (MICE) project is developing new methods of collaborative, interactive visualization of complex scientific data. While most existing methods of representing scientific data are static and two-dimensional, the technologies being used and developed for MICE provide interactive, three-dimensional environments within which multiple users can examine complex datasets in real-time. The MICE applicationThe MICE application provides high quality, interactive visualization of molecular scenes. Written in JavaTM and Java3D, MICE is designed according to the Java philosophy of “write once, run anywhere.” Portable and web-deliverable, the MICE application enables users to not only view molecular scenes on their own computer, but to distribute these scenes and interact with other users anywhere on the internet. Furthermore, the MICE application is only one example of using the ICE, Java and CORBA technologies to build portable and expandable software. Components of MICE are already in use in other projects at SDSC which require platform-independent collaborative software. The technologies underlying MICEThe collaborative capabilities of the MICE structure viewer are provided by a set of servers and protocols known collectively as ICE (Interactive Collaborative Environment). These servers are operated by SDSC and other NPACI sites as a service to the structural biology community. Connecting to and using the ICE service is completely transparent to the MICE user, since all aspects of locating, connecting to, and communicating with the servers are handled automatically via the ICE protocols and, beneath ICE, the CORBA protocols. Molecular Scene GeneratorThe Molecular Scene Generator (MSG) is a server-based front end for the popular molecular graphics program MolScript. It provides the means of generating molecular scenes in the MICE application, and can be used independently of MICE to generate VRML representations of macromolecules, which can be viewed in a suitably equipped web browser. Contributors, publications, funding and linksFunding for the MICE project is provided by NSF grant DBI 9723475.
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