Browsing the Body

ColdWetDog writes "Google Labs has an interesting new line of business — human anatomy. The Google Body Browser is a 3D representation of the major parts of the human body. Based on the well known and very expensive Zygote 3D artwork, you can zoom in, rotate, view the various organ systems (bone, internal organs, nerves) in various states of transparency. Very much like Google Earth in both execution and concept. Written with HTML5, it requires WebGL to work. The Firefox 4 beta seems to work fine. Google, of course, recommends Chrome."

Comments

breasts and genitalia?

[toQDuj]

quick question, does it show breasts and genitalia? The images on the "you need chrome"-page suggest otherwise. Which would be a great step backwards in terms of biology education, but completely intelligible from an america-centric self-censorship perspective.

Re:breasts and genitalia?

[Jugalator]

I had great success in finding her mammaries and vagina via the search box!

Re:breasts and genitalia?

[Amorymeltzer]

Even the most advanced medical anatomy textbook doesn't put a penis on the front cover. That being said, it's based on zygote, and clicking around there reveals quite a bit. See, for example: http://www.3dscience.com/3D_Models/Human_Anatomy/Female_Systems/index.php

Re:breasts and genitalia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh....

And you needed the search box to find them?

I guess I should know better....this is slashdot after all....

Re:This is where I hate Apple

[Amorymeltzer]

The bodybrowser page links you to http://khronos.org/webgl/wiki/Getting_a_WebGL_Implementation which gives you WebGL information and, for Safari, links you to http://nightly.webkit.org/

Re:"The Firefox 4 beta seems to work fine."

[bjoast]

To make it work in the Firefox 4 beta, you have to go to about:config and set webgl.enabled_for_all_sites to true.

Re:This is where I hate Apple

[OzPeter]

Why, then, not enlighten us with this information?

Send me teh codz?

Actually it doesn't even work in the standard Safari. It looks like you have to also down load the nightly build from webkit.org and then run "defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitWebGLEnabled -bool YES"

So I should apologize to Apple in *this* case

Re:Yup, it's there.

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Should I be relieved or worried that I'm not the only one who checked that out immediately?..

Great tool

[gmuslera]

Women used to say that men need a map to find the clit. Now they have one.

Re:Great tool

[Verteiron]

Actually, that organ (along with mammary glands and anything else that might let us peek beneath the clothing of the model) are absent from the search list entirely. Since the glands, for example, are visible by partially fading the top layer, I can only assume that some of the "naughty" bits were stripped from the list by Google. Forget biological fidelity, we might OFFEND somebody!

Re:This is where I hate Apple

[Goaway]

This is because WebGL is an experimental feature. It is not meant to be easy or obvious! WebGL is not read for general use yet.

Re:"Google, of course, recommends Chrome."

[strength_of_10_men]

Why the hate? Right on the front page of Body Browser it says:

To use Body Browser, you'll need a Web browser with WebGL support. Click here to get the new Google Chrome beta, or visit khronos.org for more choices.

I opted for the Canary build of Chrome since it allows parallel installation with the current Chrome release. Canary build loads the WebGL Body Browser just fine

Generally awesome, transparency sucks though.

[andi75]

While I think this is awesome, and biology teachers all over the world will love it, the transparency rendering is quite terrible.

The problem is that some surfaces are rendered, while others are not, which looks very wierd. You can reproduce the effect by only displaying the skeleton and setting transparency to 50% or so.

There are two generally accepted solutions:

1) To a topological sort and render all triangles back to front
2) Use a so called depth-peeling algorithm to render the scene in multiple passes

Unfortunately, they do neither right now, but there's always hope for the next version.

Personally, I favor 2) since you can offload all the work to the GPU. I had to implement this once for a CAD/CAM system for hearing aids (they are often custom-built, and you want to render the exterior semi-transparent so you can place the battery and electronics inside perfectly, before sending the thing to the manufacturing machine).

We really are nerds...

[Beroya]

I like how the first dozen or so comments are just about the browser compatability, and not the biological fidelity.

Re:This is where I hate Apple

[Graff]

Safari is a supported browser on Snow Leopard *after* you open Terminal and run a command line to set a flag in the (normally not seen) configuration file. Totally obvious - NOT.

WebGL is not part of the standard Safari on Snow Leopard. It's still in beta and you have to grab the nightly builds, THEN set the default com.apple.Safari WebKitWebGLEnabled to YES.

You're on the cutting edge man, don't expect it to be automatic just yet. If you take a look at the WebGL spec that I linked you'll see that it says "Working Draft", not a released spec. WebGL is not yet ready for the masses who don't know how to set a hidden default.

Re:"Google, of course, recommends Chrome."

[nanospook]

These statements are misleading..

1. Opera doesn't have support for WebGL. I just installed their Opera 11 and it's not mentioned.
2. Opera works very well and I use it daily as my primary browser. Has many new features and many older features that have been adopted by other browsers.
3. Opera was doing scaling graphics back in the 90's when everyone else was stuck with WYSIWYG..

Not getting into a browser war here. I use Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and IE in various sistuations. Just countering your spread of mis-truths..

Re:Yup, it's there.

[nanospook]

Does anyone else wonder why they put clothes on her? Is clothes part of her anatomy? Noooooo.. So you have to look at clothes instead of the human body. Typical sex hangups..