Google Adds the Human Body to Its Search Functions
On Dec. 16, Google released the first version of its Body Browser, a simulation of the human body. Users can travel, as in the 1980s classic “Innerspace,” through various layers of human anatomy, zooming in on internal organs, navigating around bones and peeling back layers of the human body until all that’s left are the stringy tangles of the nervous system.
The Body Browser works only in browsers that support WebGL, a new 3-D graphics tool that is appearing in the latest versions of popular browsers like Chrome 9 Beta from Google and Firefox 4 Beta. With WebGL, users do not need plug-ins like Flash or Java — the browser itself can handle complex graphics tasks.
The Body Browser is still a work in progress. Presently, only a female figure is available, and some of the controls are a bit balky. But the ability to zoom straight into a body and fly through it is remarkable — not to mention addictive.