Season one: Breath

The first season of BODYVERSE has a theme: Breath. It will tell the story of how the air you breathe in ends up powering your muscles: through the airways and the lungs, into the blood, through the heart and out to the rest of the body.

Season one is planned for the launch of the mobile app, which is still in development. Everything on this page is our current plan, and missions, rewards and names may change before release.

Two systems, one story

Breathing and circulation are often taught as separate topics, but in the body they work as a team. The lungs load oxygen into the blood, the heart moves that blood to every organ, and carbon dioxide travels back the other way to be breathed out. Season one is built around that loop, so you will see the respiratory and circulatory systems working together rather than one at a time.

The path of oxygen

Every breath starts with the diaphragm. When this dome-shaped muscle contracts, it flattens and moves down, the chest gets bigger and air flows in.

The air enters through the nose or mouth, passes through the pharynx and the larynx and travels down the trachea. The trachea divides into two main bronchi, which branch again and again into ever narrower bronchioles and end in the alveoli: tiny air sacs wrapped in a mesh of pulmonary capillaries. There, oxygen crosses a very thin barrier into the blood, where most of it binds to haemoglobin in the red blood cells. The oxygen-rich blood flows through the pulmonary veins to the left atrium of the heart, then into the left ventricle, which pumps it into the aorta. From the aorta, arteries branch into smaller and smaller vessels until the blood reaches the capillaries of a working muscle. There, oxygen leaves the blood and enters the muscle cells, which use it to release energy from their fuel.

Carbon dioxide made by the muscle takes the return route: back to the heart through the veins, on to the lungs through the pulmonary arteries, and out with your next breath.

Planned missions

Missions in BODYVERSE are short tasks of 3 to 10 minutes. For Breath we are planning:

• "Oxygen path": follow a single breath from the nose to a working muscle and find each structure along the way in 3D.
• A breathing mission about the diaphragm: see how the main breathing muscle moves as you breathe in and out, and which other muscles join in when breathing gets harder.
• A heart-rate mission about recovery: see why the heart speeds up during effort and how it settles afterwards. Like the rest of BODYVERSE, it will be a game model; the app will not measure your pulse.

Planned rewards

• Bio-cards for the lungs, trachea, bronchi, heart and diaphragm, to add to your collection.
• Season titles for your character.
• An aura effect for your character.

Why breath first

Breathing is something the body never stops doing, yet most of us rarely think about how it works. It connects two systems that are easy to see in 3D, and it is a story with a clear start, route and destination, which is exactly what a good mission needs.

When

Season one is planned for the launch of the mobile app. We have not set a date yet, and we will share more here in News as the missions and rewards take shape.

Missions are made for learning. They are not training or medical advice; see our medical disclaimer.