A visit to the monolith...

Imagine being able to fly through a molecule. Well now you can at the Stony Brook School of Medicine SL site where Erich Bremer has put together Monolith. Monolith creates huge complex molecules using a complex Second Life script that is actually able to import data from some of the standard molecular data base files and use that data to create 3D molecules. Way cool!

Here is monolith itself. Straight out of 2001 at the Stony Brook site.




Some molecular views. I made these a little bit dramatic and I bet some of the more artistic SL residents will want to visit.

This is a transfer RNA.














And to show you the scale these models are done at, in this view I am barely visible on the left hand side of the image:
















One more view. The metallic looking molecule in the foreground is DNA.


This is a really neat system. I haven't had a chance to play with monolith and the program is still under development.

One weakness of course is that each atom is a single prim. So that tRNA might gobble up 400 prims...so if you don't own an island monolith probably won't work. It might be possible to save on prims if monolith can be pre programmed with certain stock sculpted prims for certain common structures, but suspect it is not practical.



Certainly monolith would not work on my land in Carmine...let's see (teleporting home for a sec), one of my parcels is 1024 m squared and it supports 234 prims. Even the Stony Brook land (teleporting back...) supports roughly 15,000 prims...so Monolith could quickly eat into that. So Linden lab...if you want SL to be able to host these intensive sort of educational environments, we need more prims!

If you have SL installed on your machine visit Monolith at

http://slurl.com/secondlife/SBU%20Medical%20Center/58/26/27