Hands-On: Experiencing Software Architecture in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Recently, virtual reality (VR) and gesture-based interface devices emerged at the consumer market. Both concepts offer new visualization and interaction capabilities, which can improve the user experience when using software. In Software Engineering, exploring and comprehending software systems is often addressed via visualization techniques. In this paper, we present our VR approach to explore software systems by using a head-mounted display and two different gesture-based interaction devices. Hence, we achieve a more immersive user experience and natural interaction, which benefits the comprehension process. Our VR approach is integrated into ExplorViz, our tool for live trace visualization of large software landscapes. In order to emphasize the advantages, we apply our combined approach on a small software system, running within our webbased tool ExplorViz. In this context, we present both, the visualization and the interaction capabilities.