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.

The title of this disc is in Dutch. "Ons Lichaam" (pronounced "ons likh-ahm") translates to "Our Body" in English. However I found out the English edition of this disc is listed on Amazon as "Human 3D". And yeah, 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 a rudimentary interface with an expandable side-menu. The information it delivers is organized in a peculiar way. 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, you would have to visit the page on the endocrine system.

I came across the English edition of this cd-rom on Amazon. The description boasts that it contains "over 400 detailed illustrations!". In my own research 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 presumably lost to time, the people behind these animations gave him eyeballs the size of chickpeas, leaving him with a permanent expression of life-shattering dread.

Just look at the horror in his eyes as his kidneys and bladder (?) are being extracted from his body to be put on display for everyone. How violating, Poor guy. I wonder how he's doing now.

There's not much else to say about the rest of these, so here they all are. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do.

Thanks for reading :)