Manipulating VR-native user interfaces for software visualization customization
Additional information
Authors
Type
Article in conference proceedings
Year
2024
Language
English
Abstract
Software visualization concerns itself with the visual depiction of software systems to facilitate their comprehension. Any visualization approach, whether 2D or 3D or immersive, comes with a plethora of configuration possibilities (e.g., which types of artifacts to visualize and how, which layouts to use). This reflects the complexity of the domain at hand, where manipulating millions of entities pertaining to dozens of different types of artifacts is common. Most visualization tools encode their customizations in the form of view configurations/specifications (in short viewspecs), which are either created declaratively (using DSLs), or through custom user interfaces. In the case of immersive visualization, approaches using such customization facilities are cumbersome, may generate unnecessary context and paradigm switches, and fail to leverage the full potential of modern VR headsets’ controllers. We present an approach to interactively manipulate the view specifications by depicting them as 3D objects in the immersive space, supporting definition and configuration with an automatic reflection-based mapping of the software domain model under exploration. IVAR-NI, the tool we developed, incorporates new immersive interaction paradigms (e.g., slot-based selection) and in-object real-time feedback (e.g., preview of the view specification effects) to enhance the usability of this new generation of VR-native interfaces for software visualization customization.
Keywords
Virtual reality, VR-native interfaces, Software visualization, VR interactive interfaces, IVaR-NI
Conference proceedings
Proceedings of VISSOFT 2024, p. 111-115
Diffusion
License
License undefined
Visibility
Public
Status open access
Green
