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Supersize Me: Visualizing Parallel Workspace Activities on a Next-Generation, Massively-Tiled
Display System
Gabriela Marcu, Faculty Mentor: André van der Hoek
Workspace Activity Viewer
HIPerWall
The workspace
activity viewer is
a
3D
visualization that
presents
a
snapshot of all
ongoing
changes taking
place in a set of
workspaces at a
particular time.
Utilizing both a
developercentric and an
artifact-centric
mode,
it
captures
the
activities of each
developer and
gives a clear
visualization of
links
between
developers and
artifacts.
Depending on the mode, a stack of cylinders represents a developer’s workspace
with each cylinder being a different artifact, or the opposite—the stack represents an
artifact with each cylinder as a developer who has made changes to it. The positions and
movement of the stacks give an idea of the status of activities by keeping stacks with the
most recent changes at the front, and moving stacks backward in the 3D space as the
changes mature.
This visualization provides an insight into the evolution and processes of
development efforts, including parallel, individual, and overall activities, and other
patterns and observations.
For large projects, the workspace activity viewer falls short of providing a
functional visualization on a regular-sized monitor. Due to the multitude of artifacts within
a large system,
we do not have
the ability to
interpret the
visualization into
useful patterns.
Artifact mode
S ummer
U ndergraduate
2 R esearch
0 F ellowship in
0 I nformation
6 T echnology
Additional Contributions by Roger Ripley and Isabella da Silva Almeida
Developer mode
The HIPerWall, a massively-tiled display
system, not only allows for a more large scale
visualization, but as a high resolution 200 megapixel display it provides the amount of detail
needed for narrowing down attention to specific
details of the visualization. By adapting our
visualization to this larger display we hope to
better enable people to interpret the visualization
and find patterns by allowing them to see both the
project as a whole, and the details of its separate
components, activities, and processes.
The Workspace
Activity Viewer is
written in Java,
with
graphics
handled
by
Java3D.
The
HIPerWall does
not
currently
have middleware
to
run
visualizations in
Java3D.
After
ruling out some
other options for
our solution, we
began
altering
the
system’s
architecture
by
reimplementing
the drawing of
the visualizations
in OpenGL and
C, leaving the
back end which
handles
the
workspace
activity data from
the database in
the original Java
code.
The Java Native Interface (JNI) was then used for communication
between the Java code and C code. The JNI enabled the existing Java
code to pass along to the new OpenGL code the information needed for it
to display the visualization.
As we found out, the HIPerWall has been
designed specifically for OpenGL visualizations
that are single, non-changing pictures. What we
have, however, is a Java program that is a single,
continuously-changing picture. Therefore, no
Java-based middleware was available to support
our goals in this project.
[email protected] · www.research.calit2.net/students/surf-it2006 · www.calit2.net
Part of the new OpenGL
visualization,
reimplemented from the
original Java3D.