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Virtual Reality For Vascular Plants Study
Professor embarks on VR project to improve students' understanding in vascular plants structure and anatomy

	24 shapes and structures of plants in BL2242 Vascular Plants are in the process of being digitised into three-dimensional (3D) images. Assoc Prof Hugh Tan Tiang Wah , Department of Biological Sciences, said these images will be viewed using a virtual reality (VR) video format on IVLE.
Prof Tan is an avid self-taught photographer, who perfected his skills through field research

These VR images will allow students to view plant parts through 360 degrees for each representative species for each of the nine vascular plant division in the plant kingdom. This, Prof Tan hoped, will help then to better appreciate those plants’ structure and anatomy.

Although VR cannot replace the first-hand experience of examination and dissection of a plant in the field or laboratory, VR will provide many students the chance to further examine the plants as closely to the original as possible outside lab time.

To encourage his students to use this resource, Prof Tan will introduce these VR images in his lectures through PowerPoint presentation.

Methods
Due to the static nature of plants, it is an excellent subject on work on for a VR project. For this project, Prof Tan had enlisted a student to help him with the photography work. Firstly, Prof Tan and his student will photograph a 360 degrees view of the plant structure, which comes to 36 photographs per plant structure.

Photography sessions were held in Prof Tan’s lab, using simple but ingenious home-made materials, for example, a 20 cent disposable plastic bowl functioned as a reflector for the electronic flash.

After the slides are developed, they are digitised and edited by CIT to remote the image of the pin, which was part of the rotating device. All 36 shots of the plant are then stitched together with the VR WORX 2.0. The VR images are then embedded onto the webpage. Interactive features on the website are done with Macromedia Flash.