[1][2] A VPR consists of five general components: cameras (with magnifying optics[3]), strobe, additive sensor and flight control, underwater platform and interface software for plankton identification.
This design is intended to provide the area between camera and strobe as undisturbed water volume for continuous observation in the VPR system.
This early development was conducted by enumerating and counting the silhouette photography of plankton, the result then is processed with software package such as Matlab.
Although a VPR has a drawback for not being able to identify plankton into species level, the advantages to use this instrument has gone beyond its limitation to provide us with convenient and accurate result.
The high resolution result on plankton taxa observation along with synchronized measurement environmental variables from another oceanographic sensor attached in VPR body can be considered as the milestone of this device.