Remote control and visualization of scanning probe microscopes via Web

Abstract

Our efforts in bringing the scanning probe microscope (SPM) live data available on the Web have been successful. This work is being pursued under the aegis of the IN-VSEE project targeted to bring SPM data live to community colleges, high school and other research labs/classroom. We have further advanced this to provide the capability of remote operation of the SPM via the Web. The truly remote operator can control many functions of the microscope with reasonable security and ease. The latter marks a milestone in use of the Web for truly interactive bi-directional communication involving feedback and control of an instrument. The architecture also incorporates an interactive "chat" channel among the observers and the operator(s) and compressed video delivery in separate windows. Further, since the SPM data is inherently 3-dimensional, a plug-in has also been developed to display the live data as 5-dimensional model, with support for zoom, pan, rotation, etc.