William H. Grover

Lateral flow microfluidics from paper

A time-lapse animated GIF of a lateral flow microfluidic “device” cut out of paper. Also check out the full size version (8.7 MB).

Density spectrum

I created this interactive “density spectrum viewer” using Processing, an “open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions.” The source code is available on Github. One day I’d like to clean this up and turn it into a generic multi-scale viewer for large data sets.

Animation of cell density measurement

I created this animation to accompany our PNAS paper about measuring the density of single cells. Several people have asked me how I made the animation, so here are the tools I used and the source code.

I made the animation using the free open source 3D modeling software Blender. If you can learn just one 3D modeling tool, learn Blender. Blender’s unusual UI takes some getting used to, but once you’ve created a model in Blender, you can do so much with it–export high-quality raytraced figures in vector graphics formats, render fancy animations, even make interactive “games” out of it. It may be much easier to make your model in Google Sketchup, but the mess of upgrades, plugins, and third-party software required to get raytraced or animated output from a Sketchup model just isn’t worth the effort. Blender does all of this right out of the box, and for free.