Component Technologies for Next-Generation Software Development Environments

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9970790 Kaiser, Gail E. Columbia UniversityComponent Technologies for Next-Generation Software DevelopmentThis project furthers the development of components and frameworks for team software development environments by combining hypermedia, multi-user domain (MUD), and 3D visualization technologies, to achieve "software immersion". The Columbia researchers are investigating mechanisms for: Efficiently generating the layout and content of 3D virtual worlds from heterogeneous backend information resources (e.g., configuration management and document management); Smoothly updating the 3D virtual world as the backend materials are simultaneously modified by the multiple users (externally and from within the environment); Seamlessly moving user avatars among distinct virtual worlds and "themes" to scale up to teams of teams and large collections of information spaces. Previous work on collaborative virtual environments requires the framework to "own" the data rather than drawing from autonomous sources, hardwires a particular layout and theme depicting a relatively static snapshot of that data, and limits the maximum number of simultaneous users and teams. Further, while there has been much work on 2D and 3D software visualization for program understanding, and some work on non-graphic virtual information spaces shared by geographically distributed team members, there has been little or no prior work on immersing software development staff within a 2D or 3D virtual world intended to represent the software development artifacts and/or its development process.