VIRTUAL IMAGES - INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION OF DISTRIBUTED OBJECT-ORIENTED SYSTEMS

In spite of growing needs in many areas, there is a lack of powerful graphical interfaces for interacting with large and complex sets of objects. Debugging, management and monitoring tools for object-oriented distributed systems or databases, for instance, need new interfaces that allow high quality visualization and interaction. We propose to use 3D interactive animations for representing large numbers of objects, complex relationships, and dynamic execution of concurrent activities. These innovative graphical representations, that we call virtual images, provides a consitent and intuitive solution for integrating various functionalities, considerably increasing the amount of information processed by the user. This technique has been successfully applied without specific hardware, demonstrating the feasibility of such interfaces on non specialized workstations.