Virtual Breeding Nursery: Towards a VR Digital Twin for Plant Breeding

In this demo, we present the Virtual Breeding Nursery, a VR application designed for plant breeders to do remote assessment of plant traits in a virtual reality environment. Large-scale plant breeding trials are essential for identifying seed varieties with desirable traits, such as higher yield and resistance to diseases and pests. These trials, conducted over several years and across various locations, require frequent and labor-intensive evaluations. The Virtual Breeding Nursery application, developed in collaboration with plant breeders, provides photo-realistic visualizations of 3D digital twins of breeding candidates within an immersive VR environment. It allows for efficient remote assessment of plant traits, side-by-side comparisons of breeding candidates from the same or different locations, and tracking their development over time. An autonomous robotic system was developed to regularly capture the GPS-localized multimodal data of breeding candidates, including high-resolution images, 3D laser scans, and multispectral data.