Attention, anatomy junkies — a new website gives you a detailed view of every part of the human body. VisibleBody.com provides anatomically correct 3D models of human bodies you can interact with in ways you couldn’t before.
Digital Journal — If you’ve ever wanted to know exactly where the pancreas is, how the heart pumps blood through veins and what the respiratory system looks like, then a new website is your medical Holy Grail. The recently launched VisibleBody.com offers stunning and accurate 3D models of the human body, allowing users to find any bone, organ or body system with a simple mouse click.
Developed by visual content developer Argosy Publishing, VisibleBody.com is ideal for medical professionals and educators, but it also appeals to the anatomical hobbyist. For too long the general public had to rely on texts like Gray’s Anatomy or flat static website displaying the human body. But interactivity was rarely considered; and with VisibleBody.com, available free, users can browse through more than 1,700 anatomical structures.
A small caveat, though: The free downloadable program is only available for PC users with Internet Explorer.
Since its private beta December 2007 launch, and the public launch last week, more than 180,000 people have signed up for VisibleBody.com accounts.
VisibleBody.com includes more than 1,700 anatomical structures, such as the brain
“The appeal of this site is the ability to manipulate what you see,” says Argosy Publishing CEO Andrew Bowditch in an interview with DigitalJournal.com. “You can take any object and turn it any direction a virtual 3D environment. You can look through muscles at rib cages,then look through rib cages to see the lungs, all in real time.”
The site also allows users to pick a bone, for instance, and isolate it completely. It’s incredibly easy to have every other part of the human body disappear except for that selected bone. VisibleBody.com identifies the bone but has yet to add encyclopedic content on that bone’s relationship to the body.
Bowditch says the program complements any doctor’s visit: If you go for a checkup and your physician wants to explain what’s wrong with a certain part of your body, he could highlight it in VisibleBody.com, rotate it at different angles and give you a more comprehensive look into your own body. Also, injuries can be better explained by pointing to the affected area.
“You can look through muscles at rib cages,then look through rib cages to see the lungs, all in real time,” says Argosy Publishing CEO Andrew Bowditch
Bert Oppenheim, manager of art and multimedia at Argosy, said he used 3D Studio Max from Autodesk to render anatomically correct human models in VisibleBody. “It’s in the top three software programs in terms of professionally building 3D geometry,” he says.
The VisibleBody team aren’t content to rest on the laurels of their impressive work just yet. Oppenheim says there will soon be “entire pathologies to view and compare.” For example, a cross-section of a health stomach could be compared to an ulcerous stomach. Oppenheim would also like to include diseases and symptoms such as the narrowed bronchial tube in asthmatics.
The program can display cross-sections of human body parts, allowing physicians to better explain ailments to their patients.
If our body is a temple, then VisibleBody.com is a guided tour through all the holy sites under our skin. Medical experts aren’t the only people who can appreciate the site’s flexibility; the curious layperson would benefit from the detailed info swamping VisibleBody. The site’s existence represents the starting point for where this innovation can progress — displaying contractible diseases, showing a broken bone’s affect on the spine, outlining the reproductive process, and so on.
The only problem is the VisibleBody creators have opened a Pandora’s Box of possibilities, and their list of added features will only grow as a hungry audience seeks to fulfill their inner physician.
