Abstract-We introduce Code Park, a novel tool for visualizing codebases in a 3D game-like environment. Code Park aims to improve a programmer's understanding of an existing codebase in a manner that is both engaging and intuitive, appealing to novice users such as students. It achieves these goals by laying out the codebase in a 3D park-like environment. Each class in the codebase is represented as a 3D room-like structure. Constituent parts of the class (variable, member functions, etc.) are laid out on the walls, resembling a syntax-aware "wallpaper". The users can interact with the codebase using an overview, and a firstperson viewer mode. We conducted two user studies to evaluate Code Park's usability and suitability for organizing an existing project. Our results indicate that Code Park is easy to get familiar with and significantly helps in code understanding compared to a traditional IDE. Further, the users unanimously believed that Code Park was a fun tool to work with.
Code Park REF proposes an immersive visualization of software metrics and source code; an evaluation showed that the visualization displayed in virtual reality excels at usability and significantly helps in code understanding.
Code Park: A New 3D Code Visualization Tool
2017 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)
2017 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT)
Computer Science