Applying virtual reality to teach the software development process to novice software engineers

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

An interactive 3D virtual environment to reduce the public speaking anxiety levels of novice software engineers

Software engineering is a set of activities that relies no only on technical tasks but also requires 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 virtual exposure therapy is an effective strategy to reduce public speaking anxiety. In this study, an interactive 3D virtual environment similar to real classrooms and auditoriums was developed to examine if this might decrease the anxiety levels of novice software engineers. To compare traditional and virtual exposure therapy, the sample set (N = 14) was divided equally into 2 groups including one experimental group and one control group. For 4 weeks, the virtual exposure therapy was conducted in the experimental group whereas psychoeducation was used in the control group. The findings from our study illustrate that virtual exposure therapy may be represent an alternative solution to the traditional therapeutic intervention for software engineers seeking to overcome public presentation anxiet

Phaneros: Visibility-based framework for massive peer-to-peer virtual environments

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

Acceptance of virtual worlds as learning space

This study investigated relationships among perceived usefulness (PU), ease of use and perceived enjoyment, plus their relationships with the behavioural intention (BI) of individuals to use virtual worlds as a learning space. Participant responses to a questionnaire were analysed, and results indicated that while PU seemed to affect BIs most, perceived enjoyment (PE) and ease of use also played a role. Moreover, PE and ease of use also affected PU. Namely, if students found a virtual world enjoyable and easy to use, they perceived it as useful for learning and performance. In addition, the effect of PE on perceived ease of use showed that if students found a virtual world enjoyable, they underestimated difficulties using it. Findings highlighted important issues for the acceptance and adoption of virtual worlds as learning spaces

The Virtual Marathon: Parallel Computing Supports Crowd Simulations

To be realistic, an urban model must include appropriate numbers of pedestrians, vehicles, and other dynamic entities. Using a parallel-computing architecture, researchers simulated a marathon with more than a million participants. To simulate participant behavior, they used fuzzy logic on a GPU to perform millions of inferences in real time

How Does Software Visualization Contribute to Software Comprehension? A Grounded Theory 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

Realistic modeling of spectator behavior for soccer videogames with CUDA

Soccer has always been one of the most popular videogame genres. When designing a soccer game, designers tend to focus on the game field and game play due to the limited computational resources, and thus the modelling of virtual spectators is paid less attention. In this study we present a novel approach to the modeling of spectator behavior, which treats each spectator as a unique individual. We also propose an independent software layer for sport-based games that simply obtains the game status from the game engine via a simple messaging protocol and computes the spectator behavior accordingly. The result is returned to the game engine, to be used in the animation and rendering of the spectators. Additionally, we offer a customizable spectator knowledge base with well structured XML to minimize coding efforts, while generating individualized behavior. The employed AI is based on fuzzy inference. In order to overcome additional demand for computing realistic spectator behavior, we use GPU parallel computing with CUDA

An Intelligent Action Algorithm for Virtual Human Agents

ABSTRACT: The objective of this study is to develop an intelligent action algorithm for virtual human agents on three-dimensional large terrains to accomplish a specified mission by group communication and coordination. The area contains natural and build-in entities such as trees, rocks, rivers, roads, houses, bridges, etc. Our platoons that are represented by virtual human agents enter a specific area to perform a specified mission, which may be to attack, escape or just pass through a selected tactical area. The area contains static and/or moving platforms such as jeeps, planes, helicopters, commandos, and etc. The goal of the agents is to complete their mission in a group or by being divided into groups of two or more without being detected or caught by a platform that carries different kinds of sensors (Day TV, Infra-Red, SAR). The output views of the platform sensors are observed by the user at tactical command center in order to make the detection process realistic. Agents may follow rivers, go through the forests, and hide behind trees, run, or even crawl in order not to be seen. When any of the agents are detected and identified, they try to escape or hide to complete their mission until they are caught or terminated. 1