Advanced Interaction:
Visualisation
Investigators: Russell Beale, Bob Hendley, Barry Wilkins
Associated grants: Microsoft
Complex software systems are extraordinarily difficult to understand and to manipulate. This work extends earlier work on visual programming systems to support visualisation of program structures using self organising systems and virtual reality techniques.
Object visualisation is enabled by building a virtual world through which the user can navigate to explore and manipulate the object space. The view of the objects adapts so that they may be seen as distinct objects, agglomerations (eg. a cluster of objects may appear as a translucent mass with the individual objects barely visible) or as iconic representations. The organisation of the objects in space is controlled by forces between the objects (determined by the relationships between these objects). The emergent structure that appears can be startling and can give considerable insight into the system's organisation.
Further work will expand upon these existing ideas and may involve the development of a more complete programming environment. Other aspects of the behaviour of systems will also be included, for instance, the incorporation of animation to show the dynamic behaviour of systems.