Neuro-VISOR

Neuro-VISOR

VISOR (Virtual Interactive Simulation Of Reality) is a research and software theme developed by Temple University’s Center for Computational Mathematics and Modeling (C2M2), College of Science and Technology. The overarching long-term vision is to produce novel concepts and software that enable efficient immersed virtual reality (VR) visualization and real-time interaction with simulations of real-world processes described via principled mathematical equations. Unlike traditional high performance computing (HPC) applications, the philosophy of VISOR is that (a) the simulation runs while it is visualized in a virtual environment, and (b) the simulation continues even when the user affects and/or modifies the system state or its conditions.


Neuro-VISOR

Neuro-VISOR focuses on applications in computational neuroscience. Specifically, it provides a pipeline that (a) retrieves a wire-frame neuron geometry file from the public neuron database NeuroMorpho, and (b) generates a surface mesh from it. This mesh is then (c) visualized in VR, while an efficient numerical method approximates the Hodgkin-Huxley model on the given wire-frame neuron geometry. Finally, while the running simulation is fed to the VR environment in real time, (d) the user can interact with the surface mesh and affect the simulation while it is running via several methods outlined under controls.