Molecular visualization · Room 1, front row

Ryan Kamp

19Kpotassium 95Amamericium 15Pphosphorus the one way to write Kamp in elements. Ryan has none: nothing starts with R alone.

Graduate student at the University of Cincinnati. I make scientific pictures you can pick up, and this board is the smallest scale of them: molecules you can hold.

Drag the molecule to turn it. Tap two atoms for the distance between them, a third for the angle.

Caffeine. Nothing measured yet.

C₈H₁₀N₄O₂ · 194.19 g/mol · PDB chemical component CFF, ideal coordinates

On the board
Drawn as

Project 1 · 2026 to present

Splashery

16Ssulfur 15Pphosphorus 57Lalanthanum 16Ssulfur 1Hhydrogen 68Ererbium 39Yyttrium

An interactive Gaussian splat playground that runs entirely in the browser. Pick a toy (a real captured object, or one generated from a seed), spin it, poke it, blow on it, splash paint on it, drop it, watch it fall apart and come back, make your own, and share it as a link, an embed, a GIF or a video.

Its molecule viewer is the board above, made of splats in place of chalk. It opens PDB, mmCIF, SDF, MOL and XYZ files from your device, or fetches an entry from the Protein Data Bank by its code, and draws it as balls and sticks, space-filling atoms, a cartoon of its chains or its molecular surface. Tap two atoms and it measures the distance between them; tap a third and it measures the angle. The chalk board reads the same five kinds of file, and fetches by the same codes.

Beside the viewer sit crystal unit cells built from published lattice constants, and an atlas of hydrogen orbitals sampled from |ψ|². Both are redrawn in chalk below, so you can hold those too.

Play Splashery Play with the lab toys switched on Code Tinkerer's Manual

The molecule viewer, the unit cells and the orbital atlas are lab toys: the second link switches them on. Ryan defined the project's vision and its toy categories, refined the interaction design through hands-on testing, and contributed mathematical recipes.

  • Toys Captured ones are real scans of up to 450,000 splats. Generated ones are built from seeded recipes, so a saved scene rebuilds the same toy.
  • Effects Poke, wind, dissolve, drop, magnet, twist, slice and paint run on the GPU for every splat, every frame.
  • Also on its shelves A ripple tank, a light bench, line spectra of sixteen elements, a Chladni plate, a volume viewer for CT and MRI scans, the night sky for any date and place.
  • Engineering Static files and ES modules only: no build step, no framework, no server.

A unit cell

Diamond: a = 3.56679 Å.

One conventional cell of diamond, with the lattice constant Splashery uses. Tap two bonded atoms: the distance should come to a√3 ⁄ 4 = 1.544 Å.

A hydrogen orbital

3d z²: n = 3, l = 2, m = 0.

Every dot is one draw from |ψ|² for the hydrogen atom. Blue chalk where ψ is positive, pink where it is negative. Cut it in half to see the nodes.

And the real one

Everything above is chalk. This is Splashery's own molecule viewer, drawn in splats. It opens on crambin, the protein in the tray of the first board, as a cartoon. Drag to turn it.

It comes from the Splashery site, about 1 MB, and only when you ask for it. Or open the viewer on its own page.

Project 2 · 2026 to present

grooph

Visual loop graphs for coding-agent workflows. You draw who builds, who checks, where a person decides and when the work stops.

grooph checks that every loop names a stop, then compiles the graph into a prompt package for a separate coding-agent harness. It runs no agent and calls no model, and graphs stay on your device.

Open grooph Docs Code

build check done? not yet a person stop
A loop with its stop named, the way grooph wants it. On this board it is drawn as a reaction scheme.

Projects 3 and 4

Same atoms, new arrangement

Ars Magna

An anagram finder. Give it any text and it returns every way those exact letters can be re-partitioned into real English words, by a deterministic search.

RYANKAMP

A chemist would call these isomers: MAY PRANK, PARK MANY, RAMP YANK and ARMY KNAP hold the same eight letters as RYAN KAMP.

Try Ars Magna Code

resmon

A local-first literature-monitoring desktop application. It runs scheduled searches across open-access scholarly sources, removes duplicates, and compiles reading reports, with optional summaries.

75Rerhenium 16Ssulfur 42Momolybdenum 7Nnitrogen or 75Rerhenium 62Smsamarium 8Ooxygen 7Nnitrogen

The one project name here with two spellings in elements, which suits a tool that removes duplicates.

Code

Projects 5 to 10

The rest of the syllabus

  1. reword_nerd

    A local-first browser workbench that turns a reviewed document, or a set of images, into a portable workbook of rewriting prompts. Everything stays reviewable in the browser, the download is a separate, explicit step, and the application contacts no model provider itself.

    Open Write-up Code

  2. Link Meteor

    A Chrome extension that collects links with their anchor text and URL in separate fields, for reviewing sources and exporting a research collection. No account, ads, telemetry or backend.

    Website Code

  3. English OpenList

    A free, open, continuously maintained list of valid English words, about 345,000 of them, with the provenance of every word (which sources attested it, and when), auditable correction records, and a browser explorer.

    Explore Code Dataset

  4. aqrobat

    A local text and emoji QR lab: QR artwork built from letters, symbols or emoji.

    Make one Code

  5. Amordle

    A free word game: any word length from 2 to 35 letters, three difficulties, a daily puzzle, and ranked multiplayer with an Elo rating.

    Play Write-up Code

  6. The Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off in Perceptual Decision-Making

    Undergraduate research capstone, April 2025. It models evidence accumulation as a diffusion process and uses dynamic programming and value iteration to study decision boundaries in a simulated autonomous-vehicle obstacle-avoidance scenario.

    Code Video

Extra credit

Written in elements

Some words can be written with nothing but the symbols on the periodic table. Kamp can, one way. Splashery can, one way. Caffeine can: calcium, fluorine, iron, iodine, neon. Chalk and slate both can.

The search tries every one-letter and two-letter symbol at every position. It was checked against a brute-force build of every run of the 118 symbols.

20Cacalcium 9Ffluorine 26Feiron 53Iiodine 10Neneon

One way.

Office hours

Research interests

Scientific visualization, computer graphics, digital media, software engineering, and information retrieval.

This page follows the first of them down to its smallest subject. Molecular visualization is an interest: the question of how to draw a thing nobody can see so that a person can turn it over, measure it and trust what they measured.

MS in Computer Science, concentration in Artificial Intelligence, University of Cincinnati, August 2025 to expected May 2027. Thesis advisor: Dr. Yizong Cheng. BA in Mathematics and BS in Neuroscience, University of Cincinnati, January 2020 to May 2025. Capstone advisor: Dr. Hyunjoong Kim.

Behind the lecture hall

The stockroom

Every small molecule here is a chemical component from the Protein Data Bank, at its ideal coordinates. Every protein and nucleic acid is a PDB entry. Pick one and it goes on the first board.

Bring your own

Four characters name an entry: 4HHB is human hemoglobin. Up to three name a chemical component: GTP. This asks rcsb.org for that one file.

PDB, mmCIF, SDF, MOL or XYZ. It is read here, on your device, and sent nowhere. You can also drop a file on the first board.