Program visualization in a virtual environment

The content of this paper describes the work carried out in the authors' laboratory to create a concept demonstrator of program visualization in a virtual environment. Understanding and maintaining programs is a difficult task, even when the programs have been well designed and engineered, and providing the user with a graphical representation may he useful because ii uses the instinctive skills of humans in recognizing and comprehending graphical information and patterns by visualization. However, the presentation of the information must be recognizable enough to allow the user to concentrate his or her cognitive skills for the purpose of the comprehension of the program, not of the representation itself. The approach described in this paper is to maintain a representation of the system within a virtual environment. The positioning of the components within the three-dimensional space is determined by behavior attached to the components which, typically, leads to a spatial organization that reflects the semantic structure of the system. Furthermore, different levels of abstraction in the visualization allow the user to understand the system from the overall structure to the more specific details of the implementation.