Augmented Reality Based Bee Drift Analysis: A User Study

We present HoloBee, a system for visual analytics of bee drift data using a head-mounted augmented reality interface (Microsoft HoloLens). HoloBee facilitates interactive manipulation and exploration of the bee activity data on 3D geo-spatial terrains to gain insights into the drifting behaviour of honey bees in their natural habitat. We conducted a user study to compare the task performance and user experience of HoloBee with a conventional desktop application. The results show that HoloBee allows for solving tasks in a similar time and accuracy compared to the desktop interface, despite participants' having significantly more experience interacting with a desktop interface. We received positive feedback from a subset of participants on the natural and intuitive interactions that HoloBee provides, while others preferred using the desktop application. We discuss the implications and limitations of these results and provide guidance for future work in this direction.