Apr 10 2013
The National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago's Einstein Brain Atlas iPad app has been transformed into a museum-sized interactive device now on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The Einstein Brain Atlas app, originally designed by the NMHMChicago for viewing on the iPad, is now also available on a 60-inch touchscreen at the NMHM in Maryland allowing visitors to work with hundreds of life-size, ultra-high-resolution slides of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein's neuroanatomy.
The app, originally designed for viewing on the iPad, is now also available on a 60-inch touchscreen at the NMHM allowing visitors to work with hundreds of life-size, ultra-high-resolution slides of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein's neuroanatomy. This also represents the first time these images have been put on public display in a museum setting.
The groundbreaking app is the result of a collaborative research and development agreement between the NMHM in Maryland, and the National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago (NMHMChicago) and can be downloaded via iTunes for $9.99. Scientists at NMHMChicago developed the atlas of Einstein's brain from more than 350 neuroanatomical images. Users can explore the never-before-seen images at the cellular level using the innovative new Vscope System, a virtual microscope designed by scientists working for NMHMChicago.
"This exciting project represents the first time a cloud-based iPad application of this scale has been adapted to stand alone in a museum environment," said Dr. Michael Doyle, Chairman of the NMHMChicago. "We faced significant technical challenges to create a system which provides the same 10 terabytes of Einstein neuroanatomical images that the Einstein Brain Atlas iPad app delivers over the Internet, only in a museum exhibit running an internal virtual cloud. The virtual microscope system that looks cool running on a 10" iPad looks amazing running on a 60-inch interactive display in the museum."
The new exhibit, which also features the first public display of "maps" and photographs pathologist Dr. Thomas Harvey prepared while processing the brain after Einstein died, is on display until May 31, 2013 as part of an exhibit titled "What Can We Learn from a Brain?" The museum-sized version of the Einstein Brain Atlas app will also remain available as part of the NMHM's permanent collection when the exhibit ends.