Immersive and Interactive Visualisation of a Virtual Honey Bee Colony

Social insects and more specifically honey bees have very complex, powerful and interesting task allocation abilities. They are able to distribute their workforce effectively without any central control, using simple mechanisms based on stimuli (dances, pheromones), interactions, thresholds and feedback loops. Self-organisational concepts and some of those mechanisms, like pheromones, are invisible to the human eye. In order to help the user grasp the complexity of the task allocation, we propose to make them visible in a virtual, immersive and interactive environment. First, this implies that the system must be able to simulate and display in real-time around 30 000 bees interacting with each other, emitting clouds of pheromones. Secondly, this implies also that the user should be able to alter in real-time the environment of the bees (e.g. by manipulating the frame of the hive) and visualise the effects on the organisation, potentially days later. Finally, we would like to give to biologists and beekeepers some domain-related, intuitive and natural ways of interacting with the hive. We describe in this article these issues in more details, and how we plan to tackle them. This is a "work in progress", therefore a lot of work has still to be done, mostly surveying and modelling the interactions.