O S O MBjarni Kristján LeifssonBUILDDEPLOYIMPACT

loading 45,879 triangles of heart…

ACT 01 · THE PUMP

LEAD II68 bpm · 25 mm/s

About 300 grams, roughly the size of your own fist, sitting slightly left of centre behind the sternum. At rest it moves around 70 millilitres with each beat and about five litres a minute — your entire blood volume, every minute, while you sit still. Under hard exercise that can reach twenty-five. It is the only muscle you own that has never rested and never will.

where this comes from

The geometry is BodyParts3D (© DBCLS, CC BY-SA 2.1 JP) — 45,879 triangles of real heart, with the great vessels carved from the same body scan. The beat is not a loop: every vertex has an activation time built from real conduction velocities — about 1 m/s across the atria, a deliberate 0.1 s hold at the AV node, then 2–4 m/s down the Purkinje fibres — and the trace is that same clock read as a lead II ECG. Arteries and veins each pulse on their own waveform — the arterial pressure wave, and the jugular a–c–v trace, which is driven by the atria and is a fraction of the size. FIBRESdraws the epicardial muscle helix at its real angle, about 60° to the circumference — two opposed helices shortening at once is why a ventricle wrings rather than simply squeezing.

One honest caveat: this scan is a single closed outer surface and has no interior. So the valves, septum, papillary muscles and chordae under INSIDE are drawn, not measured — placed where those structures sit and moving on the schedule they really move on, in a paler material so you can always tell which parts of this page are scan and which are diagram. The four chambers are a positional approximation: this scan is one welded surface with no internal septum, so they are divided at the midline and the atrioventricular groove. Drag to turn it, scroll to zoom.