Thank you very much for inviting me to revise this manuscript, which presents the importance of virtual reality in different contexts. I think this is a very important contribution to the field of virtual morphology. As I am not an expert on virtual reality, I cannot comment on the details of this technique, but I have learned a lot by reading this manuscript.
In 2018 I published my first paper as first author (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joa.12743), on which we analysed the lung morphology of males and females in Homo sapiens using virtual techniques (I invite the authors to see the cool 3D lung models extracted from the CT scans). Now that I read this manuscript, I see the potential of virtual reality even for that work, so I will keep it in mind for the future.
The manuscript offers plenty of resources (some of them open-source, which is great) that makes this technique more accessible to everyone who want to start playing. As an open science advocate, I really appreciate the paragraph of “Best practices”. This kind of virtual techniques, contrary to most physical techniques, offer the opportunity to generate and host 3D models in virtual repositories. This allows replicability and reproducibility. In this line, I miss more in-depth reflection about the importance of virtual reality for best practices and open science. Also, I am sure that in the aftermath of a pandemic, these virtual resources have become more important than ever, so I would like the authors reflect (a bit more) about how this virtual technique could contribute to open science (keeping in mind the ethical considerations, e.g. when working with clinical data) and how these techniques can help in avoiding truncation of projects during a potential future lockdown, travel restrictions, etc.
As I can see the name of the authors, I think it is fair they can see my name as well. Therefore, I sign my report below. Lastly, my apologies if I missed something or any of my comments are redundant or does not make sense.
Nicole Torres-Tamayo