Contacts
Luba.TCHERTANOV [at] cmla.ens-cachan.fr (Luba Tchertanov)
atman.kendira [at] cmla.ens-cachan.fr (Kendira Atman)
#‎Yeux2Sc

CNRS series broadcast  on "Les yeux de la Science" blog  

Science at the box office: Mission Digiscope

Digiscope - Shiva
If research were a movie, what would its trailer look like?

A CNRS series broadcast in partnership with LeMonde.fr merges the worlds of cinema and research to present very serious science in Hollywood-style trailers.

“Mission Digiscope” focuses on the network of 10 core facilities at Université Paris-Saclay, one of which, Shiva, is installed at ENS Paris-Saclay.

Shiva (SHared Interactive Vision Area)

Shiva consists of a 235-inch (5m x 2m) ultra-high resolution stereo display wall with infrared cameras for 3D interaction, a 7.2 sound system and a motion tracking system.

It is also designed to provide methodologies and use scenarios as part of industrial technical reviews that require data exchange between several teams on different sites.

Projects and applications with Shiva

CMLA BiMoDyM team, led by research director Luba Chertanov, uses Shiva for their research focused on developing computational methods for biology and applying these methods to explain fundamental biological and clinical questions.

The facility meets the team’s needs for:

  • stereoscopic visualization of macromolecules and their complexes;
  • development of the immersive environment coupled with haptic devices (robotic arms) for intuitive, interactive manipulation of complex biological models, and for analyzing big data that represents a simulation of their dynamics.


Compared to other facilities, Shiva enables the intuitive, interactive manipulation of complex biological models and the study of “dynamic” objects with a high level of conformational plasticity.
In addition, the platform makes it possible to study the most relevant solutions (molecular complexes) in real-time, integrated in the environment, and to instantly calculate the binding free energy of the complexes, allowing the number of solutions to be reduced.

Development of the Digiscope facility

The next stages of the project are to optimize the applications, update the equipment and integrate new elements (haptic robotics arm with six degrees of freedom, interactive table, telepresence components) and to adapt the applications and codes to the expanded environment.

These stages of development will be finalized in 2018-2019 with the opening of a new 'haptical docking' platform on SHIVA for academic and industrial users.

In this immersive, multimodal application, the visual, audio and haptic renderings are combined, transmitting the information necessary to support collaboration between multiple partners with different needs (clinicians, mathematicians, biologists, pharmacologists, physicists, structuralists, etc.). As such, it is part of the future generation of simulators that will serve in the development of new drug molecules.

The CMLA-Labex LERMIT collaborative project is currently under development.