BABETTE stands for Bucher And Brouwer's Environment for Time Traversing Experiment. Its developer Johan Bucher also refers to the device as his time machine as it lets you travel through time in the life of a plant. It keeps a detailed digital record of the plant's growth and development in the four dimensions.
Johan Bucher calls himself a molecular analyst. After studying at an applied university, he came to WUR 15 years ago. He did a lot of research into the growth and development of plants, but he kept running into the same problem. 'We often missed essential parts of the growth process.' Time-lapse recordings can do wonders in such a situation, but that didn't work well either. 'Things were happening just out of view or on the shadow side of the plant.'
A different approach was needed. So Bucher invented BABETTE, a series of cameras rotating around the plant to record time-lapse images. 'These individual images are then digitized and linked together to create a video. The time-lapse approach makes jumps in time, but our footage is continuous,' Bucher explains.
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