From Confocal Microscope to Virtual Reality and Computer Games; technical and educational considerations

Abstract

Confocal laser scanning microscopes (CLSMs) have been commercially available for over 30 years. Even the earliest of these instruments, of the mid-80s (eg BioRad MRC 500), were capable of collecting a perfectly aligned (z-axis) series of 2D images that would present significant 3D processing problems to the desktop computers of the time. Our own system, an Odyssey slit-scanning CLSM of the early 90s, could easily produce 40 x (512x512 pixel) 256k images of the vascular wall (Arribas et al., 1994). Each single z-series needed to be stored on one Abstract