Code Park: A New 3D Code Visualization Tool

TL;DR

Code Park is an innovative 3D visualization tool that transforms codebases into engaging, game-like environments to enhance understanding, especially for novices, showing promising usability and fun factors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel 3D environment for code visualization that improves comprehension and engagement over traditional IDEs, particularly for beginners.

Findings

Code Park is easy to learn and navigate.

It significantly improves code understanding.

Users find it fun to use.

Abstract

We introduce Code Park, a novel tool for visualizing codebases in a 3D game-like environment. Code Park aims to improve a programmer's understanding of an existing codebase in a manner that is both engaging and intuitive, appealing to novice users such as students. It achieves these goals by laying out the codebase in a 3D park-like environment. Each class in the codebase is represented as a 3D room-like structure. Constituent parts of the class (variable, member functions, etc.) are laid out on the walls, resembling a syntax-aware "wallpaper". The users can interact with the codebase using an overview, and a first-person viewer mode. We conducted two user studies to evaluate Code Park's usability and suitability for organizing an existing project. Our results indicate that Code Park is easy to get familiar with and significantly helps in code understanding compared to a traditional IDE. Further, the users unanimously believed that Code Park was a fun tool to work with.