VR-UML: The Unified Modeling Language in Virtual Reality - An Immersive Modeling Experience

Software models in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) can been created or automatically reverse-engineered and used for quickly gaining structural insights into larger, legacy, or unfamiliar software. But as the size, structural complexity, and interdependencies between software components in larger systems grows, two-dimensional viewing and modeling has limitations, and new ways of visualizing larger models and numerous associated diagrams of different types are needed to intuitively convey structural and relational insights. To investigate the feasibility of using Virtual Reality (VR) to create an immersive UML-based software modeling experience, this paper contributes a VR solution concept for visualizing, navigating, modeling, and interacting with software models using UML notation. An implementation shows its feasibility while an empirical evaluation highlights its potential.