Program visualization in a virtual environment

The content of this paper describes the work carried out in the authors´ laboratory to create a concept demonstrator of program visualization in a virtual environment. Understanding and maintaining programs is a difficult task, even when the programs have been well designed and engineered, and providing the user with a graphical representation may be useful because it uses the instinctive skills of humans in recognizing and comprehending graphical information and patterns by visualization. However, the presentation of the information must be recognizable enough to allow the user to concentrate his ore her cognitive skills for the purpose of the comprehension of the program, not of the representation itself. The approach described in this paper is to maintain a representation of the system within a virtual environment. The positioning of the components which, typically, leads to a spatial organization that reclects the semantic structure of the system. Furthermore, different levels of abstraction in the visualization allow the user to understand the system from the overall structure to the more specific details of the implementation