Software visualizations can provide a concise overview of a complex software system. Unfortunately, since software has no physical shape, there is no natural'' mapping of software to a two-dimensional space. As a consequence most visualizations tend to use a layout in which position and distance have no meaning, and consequently layout typical diverges from one visualization to another. We propose a consistent layout for software maps in which the position of a software artifact reflects its vocabulary, and distance corresponds to similarity of vocabulary. We use latent semantic indexing (LSI) to map software artifacts to a vector space, and then use multidimensional scaling (MDS) to map this vector space down to two dimensions.The resulting consistent layout allows us to develop a variety of thematic software maps that express very different aspects of software while making it easy to compare them. The approach is especially suitable for comparing views of evolving software, since the vocabulary of software artifacts tends to be stable over time.
CodeCity is an explorative environment building on the city metaphor @cite_29 . CodeCity employs the nesting level of packages for their city's elevation model, and uses a modified tree layout to position the entities, packages and classes. Within a package, elements are ordered by size of the element's visual representation. Hence, when changing the metrics mapped on width and height, the overall layout of the city changes, and thus, the consistent layout breaks.
@cite_29
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This paper presents software visualization tool that utilizes the modified city metaphor to represent software system and related analysis data in virtual reality environment. To better address all three kinds of software aspects we propose a new layouting algorithm that provides a higher level of detail and position the buildings according to the coupling between classes that they represent. Resulting layout allows us to visualize software metrics and source code modifications at the granularity of methods, visualize method invocations involved in program execution and to support the remodularization analysis. To further reduce the cognitive load and increase efficiency of 3D visualization we allow users to observe and interact with our city in immersive virtual reality environment that also provides a source code browsing feature. We demonstrate the use of our approach on two open-source systems. This paper presents a 3D visualization approach which gravitates around the city metaphor, i.e., an object-oriented software system is represented as a city that can be traversed and interacted with: the goal is to give the viewer a sense of locality to ease program comprehension. The key point in conceiving a realistic software city is to map the information about the source code in meaningful ways in order to take the approach beyond beautiful pictures. We investigated several concepts that contribute to the urban feeling, such as appropriate layouts, topology, and facilities to ease navigation and interaction. We experimented our approach on a number of systems, and present our findings. Data visualisation with high expressive power plays an important role in code comprehension. Recent visualisation tools try to fulfill the expectations of the users and use various analogies. For example, in an architectural metaphor, each class is represented by a building. Buildings are grouped into districts according to the structure of the namespaces. We think that these unique ways of code representation have great potential, but in our opinion they use very simple graphical techniques (shapes, figures, low resolution) to visualise the structure of the source code. On the other hand, computer games use high quality graphic and have high expressive power. A good example is Minecraft, a popular role playing game that supports both high definition, photorealistic textures and long range 3D scene displaying. Additionally, it provides great extensibility and interactivity for third party software. In this paper, we introduce our mission to create a virtual world of source code in which developers and other stakeholders could explore and evaluate their project collaboratively in a virtual Minecraft world. Code properties are represented by graphical primitives offered by the game engine, and various interactivity features are planned. Besides challenges of the implementation there are some fundamental research issues considering the selection of a set of visual elements and mapping to source code properties. These elements have to be compatible not only with the visualisation and with the data model but also with the thinking of developers. We present a complete system to semantically decompose and reconstruct 3D models from point clouds. Different than previous urban modeling approaches, our system is designed for residential scenes, which consist of mainly low-rise buildings that do not exhibit the regularity and repetitiveness as high-rise buildings in downtown areas. Our system first automatically labels the input into distinctive categories using supervised learning techniques. Based on the semantic labels, objects in different categories are reconstructed with domain-specific knowledge. In particular, we present a novel building modeling scheme that aims to decompose and fit the building point cloud into basic blocks that are block-wise symmetric and convex. This building representation and its reconstruction algorithm are flexible, efficient, and robust to missing data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on various datasets and compare our building modeling scheme with other state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms to show its advantage in terms of both quality and speed.