SKY
Nanotechnology Lab

AFM Surface Viewer

Interactive 3-D render of a real atomic force microscope scan from the SUNY Poly nanotech lab.

Parsing AFM data…
Display
Color Map
Height Scale
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Scan details

Source ETC484-HkJc, Z Height Channel
Mode Z Height · Forward
Resolution 256 × 256 px
Scan Date November 25, 2025
Instrument AFM, SUNY Poly Nanotech Lab
Vertices rendered 65,536
How it works

From scan to screen

The data

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.

The render

Each pixel's intensity is read in-browser and used to displace the Z-axis of a 256×256 three.js PlaneGeometry with 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.

See the 3D-print pipeline →    Solar cell project →