How Programmers Could Work in the Future? Toward Immersive Programming In Augmented and Virtual Reality

The field of Virtual Reality (VR) has made tremendous progress over the last few years. VR-related devices, including visors, controllers, haptic devices, have now reached a point where a human can wear them for a relatively long period of time while performing complex tasks, such as playing sophisticated video games.

The field of software engineering is having a close look at this new way of interacting with a computer. In particular, the software visualization and software comprehension communities have recently started to explore the benefits of adopting VR within a working environment. Developers could benefit from technologies that promote collaboration, embodiment, memory, and presence such as immersive VR and augmented reality (AR).

We propose the notion of fully-immersive programming environment as the surroundings and conditions for a programmer to operate exclusively in a virtual environment, typically using a VR or AR set.

We have developed a fully-immersive programming environment called VRIDE. The source code of it is available on https://github.com/vito217/pharovride. VRIDE currently works in a VR setting.

Phase 1: The first phase of this project is to make VRIDE work with an Augmented reality setting (in particular with Hololens). This involves some programming in C# using Mono. The student will have to interact with Victor (student based at the University of Chile), Geoffrey and Leonel (two researchers based at the University of Chile).

Phase 2: The extension of VRIDE will have to be evaluated. In particular, we will have to compare the behavior of participants using AR with VR.

Contact: Alexandre Bergel and Oscar Nierstrasz