The second edition of Embryology at a Glance will be on sale as a paperback from 20th May, and I think digital copies are available in some areas now. We’ve added a few chapters on stem cells, cell signalling and antenatal screening with the usual full page of illustrations beside a full page of fairly brief text.
The big news with this book will be the new animations. We’ve been working with 3D animation genius Steve Atherton to produce animations of some of the key embryological processes in some of the chapters. These animations take time to produce and we’ll release a collection with the book and continue to add to that collection over time. We’ve been sharing these with some people for a little while and getting thumbs up, so we’re looking forward to sharing them more widely.
The other news is that these videos will be available through augmented reality. Instead of having to go to a website every time you want to look at an animation you’ll be able to access them in a number of ways, and one of which will be through the free Aurasma app on your smartphone or tablet. You’ll need to sign up and follow the Embryology at a Glance account, but after that you’ll just have to show an illustration in the book to your phone and it will grab the video and overlay it over the textbook automatically. More on that soon.
Daily Anatomy App updates
I thought I should update you guys on what I’ve been doing with the Daily Anatomy app since its release in January, and what I’m planning to do.
My main job has been to write batches of new questions and add them to the ever growing pool of questions that the app draws from each day. We have seem some questions repeated, and we’ve seen some interesting sequential questions on the same topic, and some similar questions asked, but these are all chosen at random. The bigger the pool, the lower the chance of seeing the same question again. Writing good quality, accurate questions with a helpful feedback description is a lot of work (and a big part of my other job!) and this is why this is a paid app – I need motivation to keep writing these things.
With some of my beta testers we’ve listed plans for adding achievements to the app, to reward users for answering a number of questions correctly for each system and region, for example, among others. I’ve also written some code to note your longest correct question answering streak and I’ll add a second leaderboard so you can compete on this front too.