[mncharity]

An educational graphic where some aspects are carefully accurate, and others utterly bogus, used by students unable to tell which are which, is going to prolifically foster misconceptions... when used in isolation. So, why do that?

Software limitations, or visualization clarity, or pedagogical focus, or budget, may require a misleadingly empty cell. But why then use it in isolation?

Why not start by showing a realistically crowded and packed representation? Briefly, like 2 seconds. Static. Drawn with crayons. By a 5 year old. Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine. A problem with these recurring... I'll call them "excuses", is that they depend on a silent addendum. That something has been prioritized over reducing misconceptions, over slapping on secondary misconception-antidote representations. Sometimes it's "that wouldn't be pretty" (almost a quote), or sometimes it's couldn't be bothered, or just don't care. Sigh.

For conveying the random violence of nanoscale, I like simulation of virus icosahedral capsid assembly. The panels are tethered together, so they can't wander off. They just keep variously smashing into each other. Disassembling, misassembling, and finally, sometimes, succeeding. The panel size/speed, and collision and attachment rates, make realism watchable. Maybe with some skipping ahead.

Apropos 'not naturally perceptible' scale... I've a hobby project around teaching scale down to atoms for early primary. It's funny or sad or something, that it's not that hard to give at least some children, a firmer grasp of the size of cells, than that of at least some first-tier medical-school graduate students. It's a very low bar.

There's a lot of "We tried teaching <some topic> really really badly, and wow, surprisingly, that didn't work out. So we drew the obvious conclusion: students aren't developmentally ready to understand so complex thing".

But as you say, XR is a source of hope. And personalized instruction. And when MIT did a VR cell biology app, pulling in and interviewing researchers for domain knowledge, they reported a reoccurring challenge was... getting the enthusiastic researchers to leave and end the interviews. So there's seems hope for gathering the needed expertise as well.

[1auralynn]

I mean, why try to do anything? There are tons of science educators working on low-tech tools like you describe, with success. My point is, we can all be armchair critics, but from my experience when you actually try to make one of these visualizations "right", you run into a never-ending torrent of complex decisions that need to be made, both on the scientific end of things and pedagogical, most of which end in some kind of compromise that others can pick apart. There's also a severe lack of funding to support this kind of work.

Totally agree on XR and scientists - biologists LOVE visualization, particularly XR. That's definitely not the problem. In fact, one of the things I've been trying to do is to make XR tools for scientists to make their own visualizations using their datasets (http://10k.systems). There just aren't enough headsets yet, but it's possible Quest will change this.

[mncharity]

> I've been trying to do is to make XR tools for scientists to make their own visualizations using their datasets

Have you any thoughts on helping them with that process?

For instance, educational graphics for atomic nuclei, and electron density, are very stereotyped and unrealistic. Some good data exists for both, but it's in these tiny communities. Education content creators have little interest or incentive to pull, and the researchers have no incentive to push, with non-trivial effort, something for which there's no interest.

So I've been wondering, might one facilitate the process? To speed progress. Perhaps say create a free Unity asset, with a set of more realistic atomic nuclei graphics. So the next time an XR content creator is reaching for a graphic, at least there's an easily accessible one that isn't the usual ball of colored marbles.

[1auralynn]

I have lots of thoughts - I made a platform for them and am partnering with various collaborators to see how they want to use it. Right now, you can import and visualize any PDB file, among other formats. There is also an open source plugin called UnityMol that has more standard molecular visualization features. My interests have always tended towards visualizing larger amounts of proteins together, so I'm not using it in my platform.

So yeah, there are lots of people working on little bits, all over the place, duplicating efforts again and again. In my opinion, what is needed is real funding and a coordinated effort to establish open source tooling, or at least some kind of platform that brings everyone together. And then more money on top of that ;)

[mncharity]

> I mean, why try to do anything? [...] compromise [...] severe lack of funding

I agree with the challenge, but suggest parts of the compromise are not being squarely faced.

Have you seen a Jackie Chan action film, where mixed into the ending credits, is a blooper reel of stunt fails and injuries? It serves to correct the reality distortion of the film itself, to reduce viewer injuries from emulation misjudgement. If Hollywood held itself to a similar standard, there would be less paralysis from "we had to move them, before the car exploded", and less drowning with "but... it was so quiet".

A microbiologist writing a young children's picture book, included an errata page. Describing the liberties taken, and at least some of the errors made. And if just maybe, one might uncharitably suggest that maybe it was motivated a bit more by concern for being seen by ones colleges as having made an mistake, and perhaps a bit less for the conceptual integrity of readers, still it served to remind of the latter, and perhaps helped.

Yes, resources are always limited, and engineering and content creation are fundamentally about tradeoffs.

But you know how expense escalates, as one moves from thought to sketch to storyboard to crufty draft to professionally polished prettiness? That means one can always afford to add something crufty, if motivated to do so.

I'd have no problem if people said, "yeah, we could have reduced that misconception, but given our resource limitations, it would have been an unprofessionally hackish job mixed into our otherwise nice work, and we prioritized polish over the misconceptions, which maybe sucks, but it has to be viable as a product".

But I've never heard that. I've never heard "we prioritized polish over student outcomes". But I have heard lots of comments about software limitations, and pedagogical constraints, and so on. But the implicit constraining context, that "pretty" is prioritized as more important than "works", that's usually not looked at straight on.

And sure, part of that is the dysfunctional way that content is created, which in turn results from the way it's funded. I talked with a PBS science creator, who commented, sure, we'd love to try iterative creation and testing, rather than creating a thing, tossing it over the wall into the world, and never being sure how all our efforts and tradeoffs actually worked out... and just as soon as we find someone willing to fund that, we'll try it.

So my suggestion is that if we were more heads up about our choices, and their costs, we might be making different and better choices.

> headsets

I'm looking forward to the 1080p Nreal Light AR glasses early next year. I've found resolution limitations more of a bottleneck than market, but then for me it's merely a hobby for now. Thanks for the 10k link.

[1auralynn]

You're welcome! I guess what I'd say is, you are more than welcome to join the effort to create this kind of content on shoestring budgets. Then in 5 years we can have a conversation about tradeoffs, etc.