Brain VR Android App

Brain VR screenshot

Brain VR is a Google Cardboard app for viewing a model of the human brain. You'll need a game controller to navigate around and inside the brain.

Available for free here

The Unity/3D source code is available on Github

See also this blog post: Brain in VR, 1989 and 2015

The data shown here were acquired by Robert B. Livingston at UCSD in the 1970's. RBL had studied many brains using a process he called "cinemorphology": the tissue was infused with paraffin and successive layers were shaved off the block and photographed. He chose a particularly "average" specimen (#0035) to digitize by hand, producing contours like a topographic map, spaced about a millimeter apart. He also segmented the contours into the distinct anatomical structures shown in the demo. I've cleaned up the data a lot but it's essentially still the same coordinates RBL digitized in the 1970's.

This is the same data that was used to create imagery of Spock's brain in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (about 99 minutes into the film):


Still frame from Star Trek: the Motion Picture showing use of Livingston's brain imagery

More links about this data are on the right, including a video of the same data (sort of) in VR in 1989!

This is a diagram showing the game controller functions:
Controller diagram