Code Park: A New 3D Code Visualization Tool
This addresses code understanding challenges for novice programmers like students, but it is incremental as it builds on existing visualization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of improving codebase understanding by introducing Code Park, a 3D visualization tool that represents classes as rooms with syntax-aware layouts, and results from user studies show it significantly aids code comprehension compared to traditional IDEs and is perceived as fun and easy to use.
We introduce Code Park, a novel tool for visualizing codebases in a 3D game-like environment. Code Park aims to improve a programmer's understanding of an existing codebase in a manner that is both engaging and intuitive, appealing to novice users such as students. It achieves these goals by laying out the codebase in a 3D park-like environment. Each class in the codebase is represented as a 3D room-like structure. Constituent parts of the class (variable, member functions, etc.) are laid out on the walls, resembling a syntax-aware "wallpaper". The users can interact with the codebase using an overview, and a first-person viewer mode. We conducted two user studies to evaluate Code Park's usability and suitability for organizing an existing project. Our results indicate that Code Park is easy to get familiar with and significantly helps in code understanding compared to a traditional IDE. Further, the users unanimously believed that Code Park was a fun tool to work with.