Towards Immersive Comprehension of Software Systems Using Augmented Reality - An Empirical Evaluation

While traditionally, software comprehension relies on approaches like reading through the code or looking at charts on screens, which are 2D mediums, there have been some recent approaches that advocate exploring 3D approaches like Augmented or Virtual Reality (AR/VR) to have a richer experience towards understanding software and its internal relationships. However, there is a dearth of objective studies that compare such 3D representations with their traditional 2D counterparts in the context of software comprehension. In this paper, we present an evaluation study to quantitatively and qualitatively compare 2D and 3D software representations with respect to typical comprehension tasks. For the 3D medium, we utilize an AR-based approach for 3D visualizations of a software system (XRaSE), while the 2D medium comprises of textual IDEs and 2D graph representations. The study, which has been conducted using 20 professional developers, shows that for most comprehension tasks, the developers perform much better using the 3D representation, especially in terms of velocity and recollection, while also displaying reduced cognitive load and better engagement.