Photo Credit: Masumi Yajima/Sun Center of Excellence for Visual Genomics

Is this a robot from the distant future? Or an alien with a mouthful of glow worms? Ok, ok, you can tell it’s human. But what is it made of? And what is it for? Any ideas? Give it your best guess, then scroll down for the answer!

Don't peek at the answer until you've given this a good try! Then, scroll down a bit and the truth will be revealed to you.

Believe it or not, this is a caveman! Sure, he’s not thousands of years old, and he’s a computer program, but he does live in a CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment in the Sun Center of Excellence for Genomic Research at the University of Calgary, Canada. This CAVE is a cube-shaped virtual reality room. Three of the walls and the floor project a model of a human body in four dimensions, including time. Put on your electronic shutter glasses, grab a “wand” (a special kind of joystick that works a lot like a computer mouse) and you’re ready to meet CAVEman. Christoph Sensen and his colleagues at the University of Calgary in Canada designed CAVEman as a tool for studying disease – it’s like an anatomy textbook come to life. You can walk around or through the whole body, or zoom in until a single blood vessel seems as thick as your arm. Remember those four dimensions? CAVEman doesn’t just sit there; his body changes over time. Researchers can input information about a particular chemical into the CAVE computer program and watch how the chemical would interact with bodily systems in real life. Cool, huh? See more images of this floating, glowing man here.