Atomic Hand: control molecules with your hands

See it

Introducing Atomic Hand

Left: the Minority Report scene that inspired it. Right: Atomic Hand controlling 3D molecules by hand and rendering them with OVITO's Tachyon ray tracer. A snapshot gesture saves a publication-quality image, handy for grant proposals or paper figures. Runs smoothly even on a base M2 MacBook Air (8 GB).

Inspiration → reality. Minority Report (2002) on the left, Atomic Hand (2026) controlling molecules by hand on the right.

How it works

How to use it

MediaPipe tracks 21 hand landmarks per frame, and a lightweight engine maps them to camera moves. Mouse, scroll, and arrow keys work as a fallback.

🖐️ Open hand + moveRotate the structure

🤚 Wrist twistSpin around the vertical axis

🤏 Two hands spread / pinchZoom in and out

👍 Thumbs upSave a high-quality snapshot (transparent PNG)

✊ FistPause tracking

👉 Swipe left / rightPrevious / next structure

Get started

Install in one line

Fastest Using Claude Code or Codex? Just give it this prompt in a terminal: "clone the repo, set up the environment, install everything, and launch the demo" and it takes care of the rest!

One line in your terminal sets up everything: it installs Miniconda if needed, creates an isolated environment, installs the dependencies, and drops a launcher on your Desktop. Grant camera permission when the app first opens.

# macOS
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/s-choung/atomic-hand/main/install.command | bash

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/s-choung/atomic-hand/main/install.ps1 | iex

You just need git. The installer handles Python and conda for you. On macOS without git, run xcode-select --install; on Windows, install Git for Windows. Prefer manual steps? See the README.

Windows: dependencies and rendering are continuously tested on Windows via CI, but the on-screen window, camera and gestures aren't confirmed there yet, so treat Windows as experimental. macOS is the primary, fully-used platform.

Rendering is powered by OVITO's Tachyon ray tracer, which bundles its own Qt/PySide6. The installer installs ovito first to avoid Qt conflicts.

Good to know

It's an early prototype

Fully open source

All MIT-licensed on GitHub, with no telemetry and no network calls. Paste it into any LLM and ask "is this safe?". It's a rough first release: macOS is the main, fully-used platform; Windows is CI-tested but experimental. Stick to the versions the installer pins.

Atomic Hands