CrystalWalk
Entered: Wed Jun 15 2016
Operating systems: Linux; MacOS; Unix; MS Windows; Web services
Type: Source
Languages: JavaScript
Distribution: Other Open Source (MIT License)
Application fields: Crystal chemistry; Graphics; Materials science; Modelling; Teaching; Virtual reality; Visualization
Description: CrystalWalk is a crystal editor and visualizer software designed for teaching materials science and engineering. Based in WebGL/HTML5, it provides an accessible and interactive platform to students, professors and researchers. CrystalWalk proposes an unprecedented step-by-step crystal structure creation approach, imparting the concept of lattice and motif through active and conscious user interaction. Additionally, a comprehensive set of didactic functionalities is also available, as an online content publication platform for sharing interactive crystal structures, a “didactic narratives” tool that enables users to generate interactive classes based on predefined animated sequences as well the support for advanced interaction and virtual reality technologies as Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, LEAP Motion, multi-touch devices and 3D printing technologies. The process of development and implementation of CrystalWalk was guided by principles of free software, accessibility and democratization of knowledge, adopting state of art technologies for the development of interactive web applications, such as HTML5/WebGL, service oriented architecture (SOA) and responsive, resilient and elastic distributed systems. CrystalWalk is an open-source project developed by Fernando Bardella and Ricardo Leal Neto’s research at the Nuclear Energy Research Institute (IPEN) / Brazilian National Nuclear Commission (CNEN) at University of São Paulo (USP). Source code is available at https://github.com/gvcm/CWAPP and an online instance of the platform can be accessed at http://cw.gl
References: http://cw.gl