by Carmen Ruiz Fernandez
Among flight simulators and earthquake tables in the library’s Hall of Simulation, students can now explore an interactive 3D herbarium. There, they can bring plants to life like never before.
Throughout September, interactive workshops were held every Monday on the library’s second floor to introduce students to the herbarium. Diego Rodrigez, organizer of the 3D workshop, said the events were important to remind students that the herbarium is available as a resource for classes or personal exploration, as well as to showcase its features. Currently, the herbarium contains approximately 86 plants, but the number continues to grow daily, and Rodriguez can already see the impact of integrating it into science classes.
“I already see science changing the way it is taught,” Rodriguez said. “Most of the participants who come to this workshop are part of wildlife classes. I can expect it to be integrated with some of the teaching methods from professors here about how to get students to interact with new technologies that might be beneficial for them in learning specifically about plants.”
The idea for the herbarium originated as a final project idea for a software engineering class three years ago. Cyril Oberlander, the library dean, and Dr. Shereen Bogles, professor of software engineering, proposed that the class of 2022 software engineering students create an interactive kiosk similar to the library’s other kiosks, but this time focusing on plants. AJ Bealium, now head of the 3D herbarium team and the project’s only programmer, was one of the students assigned to that project.
After completing the project and graduating, he realized the herbarium’s potential and decided to continue with it. He hired and trained a student assistant to make the 3D models, which have undergone many modifications since they first started. However, Bealium is determined to continue improving the project, as he takes pride in it being one of the first of its kind in the world.
“We’ve evolved the process quite a bit,” Bealium said. “Over the course of the project, we’ve developed our own protocol and our own workflow to make the 3D models that exist nowhere else in the world, because nobody else does what we do yet.”
Hunter T. Philips, one of Bealium’s student employees, started working on the 3D herbarium last summer and handled the entire process of photographing and uploading plant models to the database. The process involves several steps: first, he and his co-worker go into the forest in search of a collection of specimens. Then they bring them to a room to photograph them on a rotating table, taking roughly 300 photos from multiple angles. After that, they upload all the photos through a program that converts images into a 3D model in about two hours. For the final step, Phillips goes into another app called Blender and refines the models to ensure they are accurate and visually clear.
Phillips sees the 3D herbarium as a forward-thinking way to preserve plants digitally and its innovative approach has already made it a popular resource for students online.
“It’s cool to say that I’m the only one in the world that has my job,” Phillips said, “I know our sites are really big in other foreign places, as our website receives a lot of views from countries like China and India, where I guess these plants aren’t accessible. It’s nice to have a unique form of storing knowledge, just as it’s cool to go around and look at the models.”
Carmen is a freshman journalism major whose passion is to write stories for newspapers. She is a writer and photographer, and likes to read and take walks through the forest in her free time. She can be reached at cr433@humboldt.edu
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