This work shows the potential of implementing L-system plant growing as
a way of building realistic scenes in a computer created environment. Just
as people decorate their homes with plants, graphic scenes look better with
a touch of nature in them. We use simple geometry to represent the plants and
obtain interesting results.
Realism could be improved by using more imaginary geometric objects to simulate
the components of plants. But we should carefully choose the object so that
it will not be too complicated for an animation system where timing is
crucial.
If we think of an L-system as a way of denoting complicated images, we could also
use it as a communication protocol for exchanging virtual plant scenes.
The plants in the format of an L-system text file would be much more efficient for
network communication than in the format of image files. As we have already
implemented the L-system in Java, and with the popularity of the Java language in
the field of web programming, in our future work we should probably build a
network application based on Java to investigate the possibility of a new image
exchange format.
As a simplification of the model, the traditional L-systems neglect
the effect
of the interaction between the plants and their environment(including other
plants). The stochastic L-systems use probability to simulate the
uncertainty caused by external factors, as we did in Section 
. To
provide more realism, we can take another approach by extending L-system
formalism again to contain the effect of the environment.
Radomír Mech and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz
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recently proposed a
new type of L-system called Open L-system. Open L-system captures the
plant-environment interaction by regarding the
plant growing and the environment as two communicating processes. The
growing process of the plant is ``open'' to the influnece of the
environment by having a
bi-directional communication channel between the plant and the
environment.
With the help of Java's multi-threading mechanism, we will explore
the simulation of Open L-system plants in Java in our future work.