Comprehension with[in] virtual environment visualisations

Abstract

For many years, basic visualisation based around simple boxes and lines, has been done in an attempt to be able to ease some of the cognitive overload caused by program comprehension. The problems with such visualisations is that they can very easily become incomprehensible by trying to force large amounts of information into a small space, relying solely on two dimensions for the representations. Three-dimensional visualisations are one approach that is being considered to combat these problems, although there are also many different issues that must be considered for these sorts of visualisations. Especially when those visualisations are of intangible software systems. A solution is to use virtual environments as a base for these three-dimensional visualisations, which allows a sense of context to be maintained and also promotes collaboration between the people trying to comprehend the code.