Development and assessment of CootVR, a virtual reality computer program for model building

Biological macromolecules have complex three-dimensional shapes that are experimentally examined using X-ray crystallography and electron cryo-microscopy. Interpreting the data that these methods yield involves building 3D atomic models. With almost every data set, some portion of the time put into creating these models must be spent manually modifying the model in order to make it consistent with the data; this is difficult and time-consuming, in part because the data are ‘blurry’ in three dimensions. This paper describes the design and assessment of CootVR (available at http://hamishtodd1.github.io/cvr), a prototype computer program for performing this task in virtual reality, allowing structural biologists to build molecular models into cryo-EM and crystallographic data using their hands. CootVR was timed against Coot for a very specific model-building task, and was found to give an order-of-magnitude speedup for this task. A from-scratch model build using CootVR was also attempted; from this experience it is concluded that currently CootVR does not give a speedup over Coot overall.