A Controlled Experiment on Spatial Orientation in VR-Based Software Cities

Multiple authors have proposed a city metaphor for visualizing software. While early approaches have used three-dimensional rendering on standard two-dimensional displays, recently researchers have started to use head-mounted displays to visualize software cities in immersive virtual reality systems (IVRS). For IVRS of a higher order it is claimed that they offer a higher degree of engagement and immersion as well as more intuitive interaction. On the other hand, spatial orientation may be a challenge in IVRS as already reported by studies on the use of IVRS in domains outside of software engineering such as gaming, education, training, and mechanical engineering or maintenance tasks. This might be even more true for the city metaphor for visualizing software. Software is immaterial and, hence, has no natural appearance. Only a limited number of abstract aspects of software are mapped onto visual representations so that software cities generally lack the details of the real world, such as the rich variety of objects or fine textures, which are often used as clues for orientation in the real world. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we compare navigation in a particular kind of software city (EvoStreets) in two variants of IVRS. One with head-mounted display and hand controllers versus a 3D desktop visualization on a standard display with keyboard and mouse interaction involving 20 participants.