Human Atlas puts a clickable 3D adult body in the browser, with 2,234 selectable parts, and has 3,928 stars in three weeks

An anatomy atlas that lets a visitor click any part of the body has, until now, meant a paid medical imaging product, a college textbook CD, or a study app on a phone. Human Atlas puts one in an ordinary web browser, and gives the code away. The project has 3,928 stars on GitHub as of today, three weeks after Ashe Magalhaes created the repository on 5 September 2026. It is MIT-licensed, written in TypeScript, and runs at human-atlas-seven.vercel.app as a live demo.

What is in it

The scene is a full adult male body assembled from 2,234 individually selectable meshes, and the search field covers 3,432 named anatomical concepts. A visitor can orbit and zoom the model, click a single structure to isolate it, or toggle whole systems on and off. Presets bring up the skeleton or the organs on their own. An exploded view spreads the visible pieces apart in space, so a bone or an organ can be seen against its neighbours rather than half-hidden inside them. The README describes it as "an educational explorer, not a diagnostic or surgical tool".

Where the model comes from

The geometry is BodyParts3D 4.0, an adult male anatomical reference published by the Database Center for Life Science in Japan under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. It contains 2,288,268 triangles and downloads at 33 MB compressed by the README's count. Human Atlas uses GPU textures for per-structure control and renders the geometry in batches, so a scene made of thousands of meshes does not turn into thousands of separate draw calls. The application code is under MIT; the anatomy data keeps its own CC BY 4.0 licence and its attribution has to be preserved by anyone redistributing it.

The stack is React, Three.js and shadcn/ui. Running it locally needs Node.js 22.13 or newer.

A founder building a health, fitness or medical education product used to have three options for a real 3D body: a paid medical imaging library, a Unity asset store model, or a hand-modelled figure commissioned from a 3D artist. Human Atlas is a working web application with a public demo and a permissive licence on the code, and the underlying geometry is already free for commercial reuse with attribution. A designer can use it the way they use an icon set, and a product team can fork the viewer and put it into a training tool, a patient-education page or an exercise app the same afternoon. Three weeks and 3,928 stars is what happens when a working thing that already runs on a laptop takes the place of a research paper on the same subject.

Source

Primary source: ashemag/human-atlas on GitHub. Live demo: human-atlas-seven.vercel.app. Anatomical geometry: BodyParts3D 4.0, Database Center for Life Science, licensed CC BY 4.0.