Interactive 3-D render of a real atomic force microscope scan from the SUNY Poly nanotech lab.
The AFM tip oscillates across the sample surface in non-contact mode (NCM). The amplitude of oscillation at each pixel encodes the local surface interaction — effectively mapping topography at the nanoscale. The raw file is a 256×256 grayscale TIFF exported directly from the instrument.
Each pixel's intensity is read in-browser and used to displace the Z-axis of a 256×256 three.js PlaneGeometry — 65,536 vertices in total. Vertex colors are computed from the same height values using the selected colormap. No server, no pre-processing: raw image pixels drive every vertex in real time.