HUMAN 3D

I'm going to be real with you, this disc came home with me for no other reason than the guy on the cover looking just absolutely zooted blasted dead. I had to see what this was all about.

This thing is right what it says on the tin, an informational cd-rom about human anatomy. The layout though charming in its simplicity is nothing to write home about. It's got quite a rudimentary interface with an expandable side-menu similar to that of any other file browser. The information it delivers is organized in a rather peculiar manner. The page on the pancreas for example, offers a multitude of descriptions as to where exactly in the body the pancreas is located, yet does not contain a single line describing what the pancreas actually does. For that information, one would have to visit the page on the endocrine system.

After a quick Google search I came across the English edition of this cd-rom, an Amazon listing of it to be exact. The description boasts that it contains "over 400 detailed animations!". In my own research however I managed to uncover about 48, but they are quite charming. About a third are sleek 3D renders of bones and bodyparts set against a black background. The remaining part are, rather endearingly, scans of watercolor drawings with the texture of the paper they were made on baked into the image, not unlike the kind you would find in any pre-2000s standard biology textbook.

No, the real meat of this thing is what hides three to four expandable menu options deep: this thing is chock-full of informational motion graphics. 172 megabytes worth of .AVI's, to be exact, and they are a joy to browse.

A reoccurring character in these animations is the translucent guy from the cover, although here, for reasons lost to the incomprehensible vastness of our universe, the people behind these animations gave him eyeballs the size of chickpeas, leaving him with a permanent expression of constant life-shattering dread. I wish I caught my genuine reaction to seeing this poor guy for the first time.