Visualization of a Virtual Caenorhabditis elegans in WebGL

Abstract

This paper presents the work that has been done in Si elegans project in order to visualize the locomotion and the behaviour of a virtual reproduction of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most studied animal in neuroscience. The project aims to develop the first hardware-based computing framework that will accurately mimic this worm. It will enable complex and realistic behaviour to emerge through interaction with a rich and dynamic simulation of a natural or laboratory environment. In order to visualize the physical behaviours that emerge from the neuronal system that has been constructed in the project, a web environment has been designed where the user will be able to define an assay and to run it in a WebGL-based 3D virtual arena. For that a relation has been defined from the physics based simulation (run on the server side) and the simplified web rendering of it.