I think you would be right that simulation was a bit misleading. In my experience, a simulation is related to time, and updated in discrete time steps. Maybe "Procedural Generation" would be a better term...
That is a nice idea! The tricky part is going to be how to integrate animations without having to rebuild the entire mesh every frame... Though, I think it would be very easy to export a skeleton from the generator and then use that to animate the plant.
Yup, I use github.com/oframe/ogl, which makes webgl a bit mor usable for the average programmer. You could also probably achieve the same thing with webgpu, but for the time being i have not yet had a reason to switch :)
One of my ideas is to build a virtual garden where your plants can grow and you have to take care of them tamagotchi style :)
Not connected to any scientific projects, just a nerd that likes plants. But projects can have a gbif.org id and then some extra information is loaded through the gbif api :)
You're right that it is procedurally based; however, I have not yet implemented L-Systems. I am a long-time Blender Nerd, and if you look in the GitHub repository, there is an ideas/blender-plugin.md file since last year. Unfortunately, I haven't found time to start building it since I spend most of my time trying to get my startup off the ground.
https://nodes.max-richter.dev https://github.com/jim-fx/nodarium