Over the last couple weeks, I have been working with Brian on the Human Visualization Project. While brainstorming with the doctors searching for the idea we want to focus our energy on, we have thrown around a lot of ideas ranging from games to training modules.

During one of our recent meetings with the medical illustrators, the idea came up that we do something with the central nervous system. With seemingly endless branches and paths a signal could take to reach the brain, we wanted to try and help make that easier for students to learn. We fired up Luster and decided to see what we could do.

Our goal: the user should be able to interact with the different branches of the nervous system by clicking them and following which path a nerve signal would travel if it was stimulated on the skin.

Since we were lacking some assets at the time, we decided to make things a little interesting. Enter Stormtrooper! The following video illustrates someone using what we created in Luster.

Hope you all enjoyed that, we’ll be posting some more pictures & videos of the real thing in the next couple weeks so check back to see how it’s going!

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

These first two show views of the body cavity and the organs. The opacity of the flesh can be adjusted interactively to allow for better views of the organs. The organs can also be selected and moved around the scene. This means you can be assured of an unobstructed view to whatever organ you desire. A simple keypress causes all the organs to float back to their original positions.

Screenshot 3

This super hi-res image shows the addition of the bloom filter, which simulates more realistic lighting in bright scenes. I am mindful of bloom overuse, but with some discretion I think it adds a great deal to a scene’s lighting. You may notice two artifacts on the arms. Those artifacts do not appear when the application is running. They are artifacts caused by the hi-res image capturing used to take the screenshot.

In the future we will be updating everyone on the status of the user interface as it is completed, as well as updates to this body scene. Look forward to seeing some screenshots from scenes inside some organ systems. We will be putting together these new scenes soon and linking them with the main application so that you will be able to navigate the body in 3 dimensions as well as zoom-and-shrink to explore at different depths of detail within the organ systems.

• Screenshot 1
• Screenshot 1
• Screenshot 1