Under the Skin of Argosy’s Visible Body
Argosy Publishing has made a dream come true for students and teachers wanting an easy to use, high quality, 3D interactive anatomy atlas. And the best part of all? It’s absolutely free.
Other 3D atlases like A.D.A.M’s Interactive Anatomy ($695) and Primal Pictures’ Complete Online Human Anatomy Series ($660) don’t offer the flexibility of real time manipulation of their 3D models. The Visible Body allows you to seamlessly zoom in and out, rotate in any direction, and go directly into the body just by using your mouse. You can also add and delete systems, make systems transparent, and isolate specific structures. And to top it all off they created a very clean and simple user interface.
I had the opportunity to interview the CEO of Argosy Publishing, Andrew Bowditch, on the development, motivation behind, and future of the Visible Body.
How long did it take to complete the Visible Body?
This has been a five to six year project. We started by building models of various anatomical structures that we could then use to create animations for our clients. About two and a half years ago, we began to put the models all together and fill in the gaps. A huge challenge was to create the programming and user interface so that people could use the Visible Body as a whole and online. I wouldn’t say it is ‘complete’ — we have lots of ideas that we are working on to continually improve on it. But we felt that it is already a very useful tool, and that’s why we decided to release it publicly now.
Is there a team dedicated to completing the Visible Body or do your employees work on it alongside other projects?
We have a core team that is mostly dedicated to Visible, but occasionally some of them work on other things to help pay our bills. But it took an enormous amount of effort and dedication to get Visible Body to where it is now — definitely not a part time side project.
Currently the Visible Body can only be viewed on Internet Explorer on Windows, when can we expect to see the Visible Body across all platforms?
We are about to start working on a Mac version of the Visible Body. It is hard to say how long this will take, because it is going to require a whole new round of intensive programming, and we know from experience that it takes a lot of innovation, hard work, and trial and error to get such a complex program on the web. That being said, we want everybody to be able to use the Visible Body, and that includes everyone who can’t now due to platform incompatibility. We are dedicated to ultimately making this product platform-neutral.
You may know some of these or you may know none, but chances are you don’t know them all!
