Virtual Plant

Modeling and visualising single plants

  • G.Vitali (proj.supervision and engine development)
  • E.Magnanini (proj.supervision and know-how)
  • N.Mennucci (client programmer - Thesys June 2009)
  • E.Denti (Thesys Supervisor)

2009

Motivation

Modeling is a basic task of modern plant eco-physiology. When modeling single plants (FSPM) visualisation is a good validation way to discover errors and to suggest a new parameterization. Virtual Plant is based on a VPEngine and a VPClient aimed to play with a plant, going to see what happens in different environments, and after pruning of parts. The USER should be able to ask the server a plant to simulate among those available and getting back an answer made of a series of frames of the plants during its developing period; on each frame the user should be able to select and remove a part and re-send the frame of the plant to the server to see how it would develop further. This VPI version doesn't allow to built up new plants and change plant parameters. The user should see the results of the simulation off-line, using the save/load features.

Technology

Both the VPEngine and the VPClient have been developed by OOLanguages. The VPClient is written in Java, so as to be run on any OSs, based on JRE ver.6 or newer and Java3D (1.5.1); the VPClient was distributed by the Java Web Start protocol, included in any Java distribution (JRE or JDK): see Tobias Dezulian - Web Start Guide. The VPEngine is now under revision.

Problems

Java3D (1.5.1) which was not included in Java so at each Java update it is likely to be re-linked: this was the reason the project has been abandoned. Also the XML language to exchange stuff with the server was redundant: JSON was envisaged to be a better choice

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