VRDebugger

Context

Software technology has advanced incredibly since its inception in the early 1950s. However, the interaction abstraction that we currently use to programs applications and interact with the development environments seems to be stuck in the stone age, using the typewriter model we still use today.

Project proposal

With this project we want to break free out of that model, and provide an immersive development experience for programmers when building their systems. In particular we want to explore the use of virtual reality (VR) technology to provide a truley interactive experience for programmers, when evaluating and debugging their programs.

To do this we will build an interactive VR debugger from scratch, creating the interactions for the representations of variables, streams, objects, threads, qbits, etc, that programmers can manipulate with their own hands.

Implementation plan

To implement the debugger we will:

• Build a parser to and evaluator to obtain a representations of a small set of program elements extracted from text.
• Build a run-time virtual 3D environment for programs [1]
• Build interactive gestures to manipulate, change, use program elements within a running program.
• Build a set of test programs to evaluate our environment

Background and Literature

[1] Oculus

Contact

n.cardozo