Visualizing Object Oriented Software in Three Dimensions

There is increasing evidence that it is possible to perceive and understand increasingly complex information systems if they are displayed as graphical objects in a three dimensional space. Object-oriented software provides an interesting test case- there is a natural mapping from software objects to visual objects. In this paper we explore two areas. 1) Information perception: we are running controlled experiments to determine empirically if our initial premise is valid; how much more (or less) can be understood in 3D than in 2D? 2) Layout: our strategy is to combine partially automatic layout with manual layout. This paper presents a brief overview of the project, the software architecture and some preliminary empirical results