Transformative Botanical Visualization: Exploring the Application of Augmented Reality to Visualize Flowers

Enhancing public understanding of flowers is essential in the endeavour to promote environmental awareness, stimulate scientific curiosity, and encourage appreciation for biodiversity. However, the lack of flower identification skills and knowledge remains a significant issue. One technology that can enable transformative visualization of flowers is Augmented Reality (AR) and this technology can potentially improve engagement and enhance botanical awareness. Nevertheless, its application in botanical education, particularly to critically explore accurate visualisation of flower species has not been well addressed in literature. This paper addresses this gap and presents an AR prototype, named Floral AR designed to enable transformative visualisation of flowers in real-time. Floral AR consists of interactive features such as 3D overlays, detailed textual content, and animations thereby depicting biological processes. The AR tool aims enhance user engagement and educational depth about flowers. To critically explore accurate visualisation, five research questions were formulated and investigated through practical application of Floral AR. The results validated the application’s robustness in accurately recognizing and tracking targets with a mean score of 82.5% in a controlled environment, confirming its viability as an educational tool.