PRECISION GRAPHICS
When Tien Luu joined Mandyam Srinivasan’s lab at the University of Queensland to study how honeybees navigate, she soon came up against a fundamental problem—how to observe bees while they’re flying. “It’s very hard to hold a camera chasing them!” she says. So she got together with some roboticists and programmers and built a simple virtual reality system: a bee flight simulator.
In the center of four standard LCD monitors arranged in a square, Luu suspended a single honeybee from a piece of wire, facing one corner. The wire was attached to the bee’s back using nontoxic dental glue that can be removed at the end of the experiment. But hanging from a wire isn’t a natural state for a bee, and Luu wondered, “What ...
