Teaching anatomy without a touchscreen

The first time I tried to study the bones of the hand from a textbook, I kept wishing I could just grab the diagram and turn it. Spatial anatomy is hard to learn from a flat page, and the 3D models online usually mean fighting with a mouse.

So I built something that removes the mouse entirely. Using a standard webcam, it tracks your hand in real time and maps your movements onto a 3D skeleton — pinch to zoom, rotate with an open hand, point to select a bone. No special hardware, no app to install; it runs in the browser.

Here I’d walk through how the pieces fit together — hand tracking with MediaPipe, the 3D scene in Three.js, and what surprised me about mapping messy real-world gestures onto clean model interactions — and what I think touchless interfaces could mean for how students learn anatomy.