Body Voyage
from Focus Multimedia Ltd
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION It's a rare solicitor that can get her client sentenced to immortality. In 1993 Texas murderer Joseph Paul Jernigan made the transition from physical criminal to virtual anatomy specimen with the help of a few million dollars worth of medical imaging equipment and a team of artists and physicians. There's plenty of speculation regarding why he decided to donate his body to science (some say to make his life interesting enough for a true-crime novel, some that his family wouldn't pay for burial), but regardless of his reasoning, he has helped produce a truly stunning advance in anatomical education with Body Voyage.
Jernigan's body was scanned from every conceivable angle, then sliced into razor-thin sections for even greater detail. Body Voyage, from Southpeak Interactive, distils the best and most interesting features from the enormous database of images. Out of thousands of CT and MRI scans, as well as high-resolution colour photographs of the slices, you get the best and clearest for examining the body in great detail.
Focus on one section (head, torso & arms, upper or lower legs) or see the entire body at once, from the outside, sliced or through a nifty "fly-through" movie that shrinks your viewpoint down to mosquito-size and zips you about inside the body. Most of the time you can get the detailed information of individual anatomical features by rolling over them with the pointer, a boon to the serious anatomy student and there's always a weird or interesting story tucked away in the accompanying text.
Windows users might find the video restrictions irritating; if you're not already using 640x480 resolution at 8- or 16-bit, you'll have to reset your display settings and restart Windows each time you want to use Body Voyage. But despite that hindrance, the visuals and features will keep you coming back. Though more than occasionally macabre--the head in particular is loaded with more personality than you might expect, and the dissolve feature is reminiscent of Diablo and other zombie-killing games--Body Voyage is far and away the best anatomical software available on the consumer market. --Rob Lightner
RELATED CHILDREN CATEGORIES: Reference, Kids Human Body & Medicine software applications
