A Software Visualization Approach for Multiple Visual Output Devices

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel software visualization approach using multiple displays and projectors to enhance collaboration and immersion, extending existing tools with multi-browser synchronization and demonstrating its effectiveness in co-located environments.

Contribution

It presents a new multi-display visualization method for software systems, extending existing tools with multi-browser synchronization and showcasing its application in immersive environments.

Findings

Preliminary study shows usefulness for collaborative exploration.

Extended ExplorViz with multi-browser synchronization.

Demonstrated in an immersive environment with five projectors.

Abstract

As software systems grow, environments that not only facilitate program comprehension through software visualization but also enable collaborative exploration of software systems become increasingly important. Most approaches to software visualization focus on a single monitor as a visual output device, which offers limited immersion and lacks in potential for collaboration. More recent approaches address augmented and virtual reality environments to increase immersion and enable collaboration to facilitate program comprehension. We present a novel approach to software visualization with software cities that fills a gap between existing approaches by using multiple displays or projectors. Thereby, an increase in screen real estate and new use case scenarios for co-located environments are enabled. Our web-based live trace visualization tool ExplorViz is extended with a service to synchronize the visualization across multiple browser instances. Multiple browser instances can then extend or complement each other's views with respect to a given configuration. The ARENA2, a spatially immersive visualization environment with five projectors, is used to showcase our approach. A preliminary study indicates that this environment can be useful for collaborative exploration of software cities. This publication is accompanied by a video. In addition, our implementation is open source and we invite other researchers to explore and adapt it for their use cases. Video URL: https://youtu.be/OiutBn3zIl8