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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."
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.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
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
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Should I be relieved or worried that I'm not the only one who checked that out immediately?..
- These characters were randomly selected.
Women used to say that men need a map to find the clit. Now they have one.
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.
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).
I like how the first dozen or so comments are just about the browser compatability, and not the biological fidelity.