staff stories

As a medical illustrator turned 3D biomedical artist, the anatomical wax collections at La Specola in Florence, Italy, were a true inspiration to see in person. Starting at the Interactive Commons only six months before our visit, I was fresh out of school and had a limited knowledge of the history of medical education.  Leonardo…

Below you can see a brief mixed-reality capture video taken by Galen Tingle. It shows IC artist, Lisa Tan, working with Dr. Jon Kiechle on some of our new pelvic anatomy. In the IC, this is a run-of-the-mill review session between our artistic staff and our anatomy experts. Despite the fact that Jon was at relative’s…

New York Times columnist and non-fiction author, Thomas L. Friedman, writes in his new book –  “The three largest forces on the planet—technology, globalization, and climate change—are all accelerating at once. As a result, so many aspects of our societies, workplaces, and geopolitics are being reshaped and need to be reimagined.” The main topic of…

My life has been a bit surreal since I joined the Interactive Commons  (IC) as lead 3D artist.  Well, truth be known, it was a bit surreal before the IC, but that’s another story.  The IC is a new team of artists and coders working together to help revolutionize the way anatomy is taught (and…

Travel Getting from Cleveland to Davos was pretty straight forward: Flight from Cleveland to Dulles, Dulles to Zurich and then hop a couple of trains until you end up at Davos Dorf high in the mountains.  It certainly sounds easy enough, but I was sure glad to be in a group.  Especially, since that group…

HoloLens at Microsoft Build: All About CollaborationAs expected, HoloLens was the star of Microsoft Build 2016, much as it was for Build 2015. There was a fundamental difference this year, though. Last year was all about showing you holograms in your world. Keynote demos showed single users exploring anatomy, controlling robots, and moving windows on…

Over the last six months or so, I’ve taken on the task of learning and implementing shaders for our group. For anyone who doesn’t know, a shader is the code which your GPU runs to take your object and turn it into something you can see on the screen. As you can imagine, a shader…

A short description of thoughts that led to the IC.

The Interactive Commons (IC) endeavors to tackle some of society’s greatest challenges by combining expertise. In other words, the things that you know in your unique discipline may provide some missing insight into the unique thing someone is doing in a seemingly unrelated area. And, to bridge different perspectives and sides of academia, we need some tools…