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Medicine Google Technology

Browsing the Body 107

Posted by Soulskill from the not-porn dept.
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."
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Browsing the Body More

Browsing the Body

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  • 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. I had to go do a search to find out how to do this, and I have no idea why the default is "off" and what impact it may make to my system if I turn it "on".
  • Which, ironically enough, cannot load the page at all for me.

    • You need the newest version. Even then, it takes a while.

      • I should have clarified this was after I download the latest version.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Only the beta works, the latest stable still has no WebGL support.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mrjb ( 547783 )
          start it from the commandline with --enable-webgl to see the pretty pictures.
    • Same, doesn't work in Chrome 8.0.552.215. How ironic Google would release tools that don't work on their own browser...

      Hey Google, should I use IE to view the Google Body Browser? Wonder if Windows Live [live.com] would ever recommend I use Chrome...
      • 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 [google.com] since it allows parallel installation with the current Chrome release. Canary build loads the WebGL Body Browser just fine

        • The hate is because the Chrome beta they link to doesn't work.
          • On Ubuntu 10.10 I had to uninstall Google-Chrome (not to be mixed up with Chrome) and THEN install the Google-Chrome Beta. Then it worked fine. If you want to check this, install the Chrome Beta, then go to Synaptic and look for google-chrome. You will see the standard version is still installed and the beta is not. At least this his my experience as of this morning..
          • The hate because beta is suppose to mean the software is still being tested, it's not ready for release to the general public, you're not suppose to run around and recommend everyone in the world download it and use it.

            I really, really don't like the recent idea that websites and software should be in beta for years. Next thing you know we'll see products and cars and food in "beta" and when something goes wrong manufactures will say "well, it was in beta..."

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

              The hate because beta is suppose to mean the software is still being tested, it's not ready for release to the general public, you're not suppose to run around and recommend everyone in the world download it and use it.

              Isn't that exactly what this body browser is? A piece of software that's still in beta? Part of the "Google Labs" family of experimental software? Hence the 'Beta' at the top of the page?

              You won't see Google touting this as a practical application (like Chrome or Earth) to the general public quite a while. Part of the reason it's publicly accessible now is to demonstrate WebGL, which in itself is not ready for production use. The only reason we're seeing this demonstration here is because new, up-and-coming

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dave420 ( 699308 )
            It works fine for me - I installed it, and seconds later the page worked absolutely perfectly.

    • What's this "You must wait 6 hours to post a second comment" nonsense??? (shrug)

      Try this:
      - Firefox 4 beta
      - SeaMonkey 2.1 beta
      - Amiga iBrowse 4
      - Opera 11
      - Or Mozilla Netscape 10 - (just joking)
      .

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bjoast ( 1310293 )
      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.
      • Works fine for me here, but I never had to reset that switch, since it's "true" by default.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Fry-kun ( 619632 )

        Fedora 14 here with OSS ATI drivers
        Chromium works fine; Firefox 4b7 works (slow~ish, after updating extensions), Firefox 4b8 (JS preview build) doesn't work

      • no workie for me either... even after checking the above (it was already set to 'true')

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by slyrat ( 1143997 )

      Firefox 4b7 no workie.

      It is also not working for me. I believe it is because our machines don't have opengl, which is required for things to work. Will have to check on this later on my non-work machine.

  • breasts and genitalia? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by toQDuj ( 806112 ) on Friday December 17, 2010 @10:22AM (#34587570) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • And it won't install because I don't have the requisite privileges. Most installers ask for my administrator's password.

    • Of course you need to have elevated privileges to write to /Applications, just throw it in ~/Applications.

  • ... doesn't work.

    But then again, neither does submitting a /. comment.

  • Firefox 4.0b7 works, yes, but it's slow as hell. The Chrome 9 beta is about 10 times faster. At least on OSX.

    • Weird, it's surprisingly fast on my work computer (terrible graphics card, I think a GeForce 7200) and almost instant to load.

      • It's actually quite snappy on my MacBook Pro with 4.0b7. I was really surprised and impressed with the speed and lack of CPU thrash. It stutters occasionally but is in general a pleasure to use.

        I'm on 10.6.4 - perhaps that has something to do with it. Or perhaps it's because I've got a lot of RAM. I plan to try it later on a older 13" MacBook to see how it works there.
      • I used a Macbook Pro from 2006 running Leopard (10.5), maybe that has to do something with it. I'm not sure what graphics card it has.

  • Great tool (Score:4, Funny)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Friday December 17, 2010 @10:40AM (#34587862) Homepage Journal
    Women used to say that men need a map to find the clit. Now they have one.

    • 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: (Score:2)

      by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

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

      Um, if I go to a strange city I need a map. Maybe if these women were with some slightly more experienced men they'd change their minds.

  • Generally awesome, transparency sucks though. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by andi75 ( 84413 ) on Friday December 17, 2010 @10:54AM (#34588088) Homepage

    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 got it to work and it's pretty cool and reasonably fast and I looked at all the forbidden things but it also locked up my machine at the "pull the plug from the wall level" twice. I used Chrome beta on a 2007 Aluminum iMac running the latest Snow Leopard.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thebiss ( 164488 )

      You're not alone. Despite a radically different platform (Firefox 4beta7 on XP with Nvidia graphics,) I experienced hangs and full-screen artifacts several times.

      I suspect "beta" extends beyond the site, to the browser engines...

  • from chrome

    the button said chrome for windows xp 7 vista.

    clicked it
    got a list of linux packages
    downloading 64bit.deb

    now has google just got a default chrome for Windows graphic or something they use for the button? it ain't right.

  • We really are nerds... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Beroya ( 1916732 ) on Friday December 17, 2010 @11:10AM (#34588354)
    I like how the first dozen or so comments are just about the browser compatability, and not the biological fidelity.

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

      That's because most of the /. readers would have absolutely no idea whether it was an accurate representation of the female body.

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

      Right, we need to get a little less nerdy and return to the main topic: skeletons. So who do you think would win, a Kirk skeleton or a Picard skeleton?

  • ... now you're just showing off.

    This is seriously cool.

  • when is the firefox team going to release ff4.0?? i don't wanna use an unstable beta and i also don't wanna miss out on cool stuff like this. why is it taking so long anyway? chrome is releasing real fats updates. they're on 8 already and probably 10 by the end of january. and look at firefox. still struggling to get to 4. even ie is ahead!!!1

  • Maybe they can work out a deal with the TSA.

  • [I might get modded offtopic for not bitching that it doesn't work for me.]

    I have a friend who's struggling through her anatomy and physiology course (becoming a physical therapist). Something like this would be a great study aid if the labels had more resolution. For example, the vertebrae are all labeled "{cervical,thoracic,lumbar} vertebra" when it would be more useful to label them individually, e.g., "5th thoracic vertebra".

  • Now I can exactly tell my tibial ligament is paining...
  • I just took a look at the Zygote site linked to in a comment above, it it is wicked expensive. $500-$1000 for a model with textures (slight discount for without). If you're just fine with the exterior of the body, Makehuman [makehuman.org], despite having a horrible interface and dog-slow rendering, is free and has a damn fine body generator. (I once heard that it also generates a skeleton and musculature, but I didn't see it when I played around.)
  • Try searching for heart or brain Google, did you forget to include some terms in your search index?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by blibbo ( 928752 )

      Try searching for heart or brain Google, did you forget to include some terms in your search index?

      Oops, punctuation.

      Try searching for heart or brain. Google, did you forget to include some terms in your search index?

  • Missing and unidentified anatomy:

    - I don't see any lymph nodes or ducts in this model, or the subclavian venous junctions.
    - At least one important and complex configuration of vessels (the Circle of Willis) is visible, but not named or searchable.

    But it's beta, and probably not meant for me...

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