Client: Florida Institute of Technology
Date: September 15, 2017
Categories: Agriculture / Data / Digital Media / ICTs
The title of this project was “Enhancing Sustainability in Agricultural Production Systems using IoT and AR”. Augmented reality (AR) can be a powerful visualization tool, but can AR help conserve water, rejuvenate the soil, and protect persons involved in the agricultural production system (APS)? Can AR help prevent wastage of energy, and spur sustainable economic development in agriculture? Perhaps AR alone can’t do these things, but with inputs from an integrated Internet of Things (IoT) network of sensors, AR can help human agents to reach sustainability targets of an APS. This research project outlines a human-centered design (HCD) approach to multivariate data visualization within the agriculture domain. It addresses the problem of sustainability in APSs. An important aspect of data visualization is that it can allow human agents to quickly discover new insights through novel interactions and critical analysis of inert data. An interactive AR prototype is developed to facilitate the display of real-time and historical APS data using a web browser or mobile device. In this project, IoT sensors are used to generate data streams that feed into economic, environmental, and social sustainability metrics. When the metrics are visually compared to sustainability targets and production trends, human agents can be supported to make more reliable decisions. Usability evaluation results of the visualization tool are discussed.