Automatic Extraction of Code Dependency in Virtual Reality Software

Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging technique with various applications in education, navigation, remote communication, and gaming. In virtual reality software, VR objects, which are graphics units linking with script files, play an important role and they often need to be updated together with correlated source code in the script files. However, traditional code dependency analysis tools detect only direct source code dependencies and can hardly detect code dependency across VR objects. In this paper, we propose a novel technique, VRDepend, to extract code-asset dependency within VR software projects. In particular, we extract (1) the direct association between VR objects and script files, (2) the compositional relations between VR objects, (3) event triggering relations between scripts and VR objects. We evaluated VRDepend based on script dependency extracted from file co-revisions. Our evaluation results show that VRDepend can cover 64% script file dependencies in historical commits of our subject VR software projects.