Luckily from a bandwidth perspective, you didn’t have to download all of Jernigan. Each slice was a mere seven megabytes in a spatial resolution of 2,048 by 1,216 pixels (several times sharper than that of a typical personal computer). A maker of software for ophthalmologists could pull down only the images dealing with the eye and related brain areas. Those aiming for the podiatry market could focus on the feet and ankles. What’s more, even without a license, ordinary Net users could dial up Jernigan Lite, so to speak, from the World Wide Web. Coming over the Net eventually would be more than just the raw, unprocessed images. Refined versions—for example, animated Jernigans, rotating in 3-D, or even virtual reality versions—could go anywhere in the world. And when they did, researchers and students would be wanting their own pet views. CD-ROMs just didn’t store enough data to anticipate all the possibilities. Typically they could hold maybe 650 megabytes of data. Even extended, the storage would offer a fraction of what could be available via high-speed connections to sites from Paris to Melbourne. Jernigan, you might say, was more than just the material for a medical experiment. He was also a focus of a research project to develop special formats for libraries of visual information on the Net. Eventually people would be able to download not just images but also the “objects” that made up the images. “These objects will have knowledge in them,” Michael Ackerman said, “so they know how they relate to each other and the rest of the scheme. Say you ask for the heart. What you get of course is the not a picture of the heart but the objects that made up the heart that your software has now rendered as the heart. If you point to something on the heart, it can open up because it’s made up of these objects. And if you point to something on the margin of the heart and say “What is attached here?” that object on the margin knows what its nearest neighbor is even though it’s not in the picture. And it knows to go back to the database and bring up what’s attached to it.” Such an approach might even take advantage of Web-style technology to link together libraries at a number of locations. So you might smoothly travel from, say, a processed image of a blood vessel done up at School X to an animated image of a heart as tweaked by Company Y.