The Growthoscope is a life-size instrument that creates an interface with whole living plants allowing us to explore and visualise the growth of plant. The plant is placed on a specimen plate giving a complete view of a whole living plant. Four surrounding cameras capture images at 1 frame per second.  At a 45-degree angle from one side and above the plant a semi-transparent screen, the eyepiece, is fixed from which both living plant and its virtual history can be seen overlapping. The transparency allows for the alignment of plants so that both images of plants can be seen, the real (living) and virtual (projected) simultaneously.

The projections of the image on the screen of the living plant can be manipulated by interacting using a handle-like navigation bar in a throttle-like manner. The history (or playback) can be viewed up until the very moment, drawing a line in history up until ‘the’ now – the last point in the real plants development and growth. Using the one handle, we can alter the speed of the projected image in terms of lapse between each frames whilst in the other we can stretch the history backwards and forwards towards the last capture.  We observe the history of the growth in time-lapse-like manner projecting the image of its growth upon itself.  

The image of the plant is constantly relayed and stored onto a computer hard drive and the interaction that changes the parameters of a bespoke program and recalled into configuration enabling playback as the images come in.  The hope is to capture plants specific moment when rapid motion occurs, the closing on the leaves at night to sleep or the seedlings spurt of growth, in that way the Growthoscope could fulfil its purpose capturing real-time -growth in plants.