hello everyone,
Updates to BrainMeta.com have been pushed back slightly to allow for the development of a major addition to the Human Brain Project. My work recently has involved putting together a web service and atlas for the interactive 3D navigation through high resolution neuroanatomical image stacks. You may be interested in seeing some of this work at http://primate-brain.org . I'd be curious to hear your feedback.
Shawn

Hello Shawn,
I've had a peek your site and found it to download verrrrrry slowly.
Mind you, I did not have plug-ins enabled (I think it needed Flash).

Once visible, I had difficulty using the controls to do anything except move the brain slice over the screen and magnify or reduce the image.
I couldn't get it to show different slices which is what I expected.
Perhaps 3D means something else, but I couldn't get any rotation either!
Take care.

It was so slow to load that I gave up. But I look forward to seeing something on another occasion. Perhaps it is meant to be slow, making a point about primate brains?

thanks for the feedback over the slow speed. It's good to know these things. I'm generating smaller image sizes as I type, which will speed up the loading of the page. You should give it another try and let me know if it still loads slow.

As Bill pointed out, the rotations and navigation in 3D aren't complete, yet. I'll need a little time to code this up. Also, as Bill pointed out, the viewer is in Flash, though most browsers probably have the plugin for it, and if not, it can usually be installed straightforwardly.

now taking 2 minutes to load.
Title might be better in a contrasting colour to background.
Symbol descriptions would be useful (except +,_ <,>).

937 items to load. Using a Mac, and Explorer just couldn't cut it. But Safari loaded everything fine (yes, about 2 minutes) and then it worked OK. Would be better if, when clicking on on of the thumbs, you were repositioned at the top where the enlarged image appears, rather than having to scroll there.

Shawn here. It's really neat. I'm getting the Slashdot effect at http://primate-brain.org now, since the appearance of an article over the site at http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/21/1711223

How long until the mystery of the brain is solved? Hopefully not much longer!

http://dukemednews.org/news/article.php?id=8662

Monkeys Adapt Robot Arm as Their Own....

lol

I just acquired http://brainmaps.org and have it pointed at http://Primate-Brain.org . I will likely change the name of Primate-Brain.org to BrainMaps.org, probably tomorrow. In any event, both http://brainmaps.org and http://primate-brain.org will point to the same site, at least for now.

http://brainmaps.org is now underway and is worth taking a look at.

Rhymer here.
Shawn, is there a way to indicate, on-screen, what distance a 1cm. box represents at any given magnification of the shot being viewed?
I know you have the full pic with a red box which gives a bit of a clue, but an actual dimension would be useful (but then I'm no expert on this).
This would also be useful when looking at the high res shots as the browser takes some time to download an in-focus view, and one wonders if the + has been hit too many times!

Your explanatory notes are great for nummies like myself, but again I suspect different colours for the descriptors may show thr info even better (eg red on green does not read well on my monitor - this may just be my problem).
Your changes to date have really improved the site in my opinion.

Hi SHawn,
Nav guide yes!

Glad to be useful.

How's this for a slogan?

BrainMaps.org - the Google Maps of the Brain!

Or what about

neurone-viewzone.com

No Shawn - I just got the impression that the immediately previous (anonymous) poster was coming up with new naming ideas for your brainmaps.org website and neuroneviewzone dropped out of my neurone zone! LOL