Exploring simulations

Embedding

Drop a live Helix viewer into a paper, a slide deck, a blog post, or a course page. The embed is a real viewer — interactive, with the same controls as the full page.

The iframe

Every public simulation exposes an embed URL at /embed/<id>. Drop that into an iframe:

<iframe
  src="https://simedo.work/embed/sim_8x4n2"
  width="100%"
  height="500"
  style="border: 0; border-radius: 12px;"
  allowfullscreen
></iframe>

URL parameters

The embed URL accepts a few options:

  • ?t=120 — start at frame 120.
  • ?rep=cartoon — initial representation (cartoon, stick, surface, spacefill).
  • ?chain=A — focus camera on a specific chain.
  • ?ui=minimal — hide the side panels for a slide-friendly view.
  • ?autoplay=1 — start the timeline playing on load.

For papers

For figures in a manuscript, render a high-DPI screenshot from the view you embed, with a caption that mentions the simulation URL. Reviewers can click through to the live viewer if they want to see motion; print readers see a clean static figure. The viewer page exposes a one-click PNG export from the share menu.

For talks

Use ?ui=minimal&autoplay=1so the embed starts moving the moment the slide is shown. Most presentation tools (Keynote, Google Slides, Notion) let you paste a URL and it'll render as a live frame.

For courses

We're working on a lightweight assignments layer: an instructor creates a question against a simulation, the embed shows the prompt next to the viewer, and students submit short written answers linked to a specific timestep. Email us if you'd like early access.

Self-hosting

For institutions that need air-gapped hosting, the viewer is open-source and runnable behind a firewall. Contact us for deployment notes; we'll publish the open-source repo at GA.