Abstract Software development is a complicated process that requires experienced human resources to produce successful software products. Although this process needs experience from the individuals, it is hard to provide this experience without encountering real incidents during the software development process. To fill this gap, this study proposes a Virtual Reality Based Software Development Framework (VR‐SODEF), which provides an interactive virtual reality experience for individuals learning about the tasks of software development starting from requirement analysis through software testing. In the VR‐SODEF, the participant takes on the role of a novice software developer being recruited into a virtual software development organisation who should work alongside five virtual characters, played by artificial intelligence. This exclusive viewpoint draws participants from the 2D separation of the classical experience and virtually into the world of the software development itself. Participants experience the intense dramatic elements created for simulation and confront the challenges of virtual software practitioners in a somewhat uncompromising virtual simulation environment. To examine the efficiency of the VR‐SODEF, it was tested on 32 computing students, with results indicating that virtual reality can be an effective educational medium, especially for skills that might traditionally be acquired through experience rather than traditional classroom‐based teaching.

Software engineering is a set of activities that rely not only on the technical tasks but also require abilities focused on social duties such as daily meetings and product introduction presentations. However, engineers may experience elevated levels of anxiety when required to present their work in an unfamiliar environment. More specifically, they may suffer from public speaking anxiety even though they are supposed to be effective in those social tasks as well as in their engineering activities. Fortunately, previous studies suggest that the virtual exposure intervention is an effective strategy to reduce public speaking anxiety. In this study, an interactive three‐dimensional virtual environment similar to real classrooms and auditoriums was developed to examine whether this might decrease the anxiety levels of novice software engineers. To compare the traditional and virtual exposure intervention, the sample set was divided equally into two groups including one experimental group and one control group. For 4 weeks, the virtual exposure intervention was conducted in the experimental group, whereas the cognitive behaviour therapy‐based psychoeducation was used in the control group. The findings from authors’ study illustrate that the virtual exposure intervention may represent an alternative solution to the traditional interventions for software engineers seeking to overcome public presentation anxiety.

Abstract Contemporary distributed virtual environments are growing out of terabytes of 3D content and hundreds of thousands of users. Server–client architectures have become inadequate for fulfilling the scalability requirements. The peer‐to‐peer architectures provide inherently scalable, cost‐effective distributed solutions for distributed virtual environments. We present a fully distributed peer‐to‐peer framework, Phaneros, which is capable of providing necessary means to realize more efficient and more scalable massive distributed virtual environments. Using the presented visibility‐aware interest management, Phaneros performs better than existing overlays, achieving single‐hop update dissemination while having lower bandwidth requirements. The provided visibility‐aware 3D streaming scheme distributes 3D content more efficiently without creating any significant load on the server. Our test results show significant improvements over existing frameworks.

Software development is a complex process of collaborative endeavour which requires hands-on experience starting from requirement analysis through to software testing and ultimately demands continuous maintenance so as to mitigate risks and uncertainty. Therefore, training experienced software practitioners is a challenging task. To address this gap, we propose an interactive virtual reality training environment for software practitioners to gain virtual experience based on the tasks of software development. The goal is to transport participants to a virtual software development organization where they experience simulated development process problems and conflicting situations, where they will interact virtually with distinctive personalities, roles and characters borrowed from real software development organizations. This PhD in progress paper investigates the literature and proposes a novel approach where participants can acquire important new process knowledge. Our preliminary observations suggest that a complementary VR-based training tool is likely to improve the experience of novice software developers and ultimately it has a great potential for training activities in software development organizations.

Prefetching is a process in which the necessary portion of data is predicted and loaded into memory beforehand. The increasing usage of geographic data in different types of applications has motivated the development of different prefetching techniques. Each prefetching technique serves a specific type of application, such as two-dimensional geographic information systems or three-dimensional visualization, and each one is crafted for the corresponding navigation patterns. However, as the boundary between these application types blurs, these techniques become insufficient for hybrid applications (such as digital moving maps), which embody various capabilities and navigation patterns. Therefore, a set of techniques should be used in combination to handle different prefetching requirements. In this study, a priority-based tile prefetching approach is proposed, which enables the ensemble usage of various techniques at the same time. The proposed approach manages these techniques dynamically through a fuzzy-logic-based inference engine to increase prefetching performance and to adapt to various exhibited behaviours. This engine performs adaptive decisions about the advantages of each technique according to their individual accuracy and activity level using fuzzy logic to determine how each prefetching technique performs. The results obtained from the experiments showed that up to a 25% increase in prefetching performance is achieved with the proposed ensemble usage over individual usage. A generic model for prefetching techniques was also developed and used to describe the given approach. Finally, a cross-platform software framework with four different prefetching techniques was developed to let other users utilize the proposed approach.

Despite their ability to synthesize vast amounts of information, software visualization tools are not widely adopted in the software engineering industry. In an effort to investigate the underlying reasons, we conducted a usability study to investigate the affordances of software visualization techniques for the maintenance of complex software systems. Expert programmers were asked to carry out programming tasks with or without using a software visualization tool while their screens and eye gaze patterns were recorded. Statistical analysis of task performance data showed that participants who used the software visualization tool outperformed the control group in terms of task completion time and accuracy. However, quantitative analysis of performance measures did not reveal in what ways software visualizations contributed to this improvement. In an effort to identify the cognitive strategies that underlie this quantitative performance difference, process models grounded in qualitative analysis of eye-tracking data were constructed. The process models indicated that software visualizations guided the subjects in the experiment group toward following specific software comprehension strategies, which account for the difference observed in task performance data.

ABSTRACT Improvements in ways of game controlling in recent years yielded higher level of interaction. Release of motion controller devices changed conventional ways of controlling games that have been used so far. Microsoft ®; Kinect™ (Microsoft Corporation, WA, USA) recognizes motions of the players as game controlling inputs. Although touchless interaction is perceived to be attractive, games mimicking real life activities may benefit from hand‐held tangible objects for the player to get more involved into game. In this study, a tangible gameplay interaction method is developed using Microsoft ®; Kinect™ that senses hand‐held objects with their dimensions and incorporates them into gameplay. Proposed algorithm is implemented on an experimental game, and a user study is performed to measure effects of tangible interaction on Kinect gameplay experience. Results revealed that an improved gameplay with more natural and accurate motion controlling is achieved. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We propose a method for pre-fetching scene data to improve smoothness of client side rendering in distributed urban environments. The scene is represented as a graph where the nodes are the view-cells and the edges denote the adjacencies among the cells. Prefetching is transformed into graph partitioning problem where the partitions might overlap with each other. We utilize Simulated Annealing algorithm to find an approximation for the optimum partitioning where the rendering cost is minimum. The presented method works on heuristics to minimize average cost and maximum view-cell transition cost.

In the recent years graphics processing units (GPU) have evolved into general purpose programmable streaming parallel processors. This evolution makes it possible to implement high quality photo realistic rendering techniques on graphics processors. There have been a few studies to show how to map ray tracing to the GPU. Since graphics processors are not designed to process complex data structures, it is crucial to explore data structures and algorithms for efficient stream processing. In particular ray traversal is one of the most time consuming parts of ray tracing methods. In this work we focus on the efficient ray traversals on GPU. Several known techniques have been redesigned and adapted to the GPU programming model. Also a new traversal method based on extended anisotropic chessboard distance metric has been introduced.

The rendering and animation of complex scenes containing many objects represented by large numbers of display primitives requires time proportional to the total number of primitives in the scene. To improve the performance of a given graphics engine, multi-resolution modeling techniques are usually used to reduce the total number of primitives required to be rendered. However, existing techniques are usually slow and some of them may not even preserve the topology of the object geometry faithfully. In this paper, we present an efficient and simple algorithm to generate an object model of the desired resolution given a high resolution model of an object and the distance of the object from the view point. The major advantages of the new method are that it preserves the topology of the given model, it can be used to generate multi-resolution models on the fly and in real-time, and its performance is predictable. The last advantage makes it well fit into the framework that we proposed m our work on real-time rendering in virtual reality[1].