Hands-On Plant Root System Reconstruction in Virtual Reality

VRoot is an immersive extended reality reconstruction tool for root system architectures from 3D volumetric scans of soil columns. We have conducted a laboratory user study to assess the performance of new users with our software in comparison to established software. We utilize a plant model to derive a synthetic root architecture, providing a baseline for reconstruction. This demo showcases the processes and techniques contributing to exact and efficient manual root architecture reconstruction in Virtual Reality. The extraction task typically is the sparse graph-structure extraction from a 3D magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI) data set. We visualize the RSA directly within the MRI and offer selection-set-based methods of adapting and augmenting the root architecture. This application is in productive use at our partner institute, where it is used to analyze complex root images.