POODLE

POODLE was a project with Cleveland Gibbon (no longer with the school). It visualised the structure of large scale object oriented programs in a CVE.

Each program shown is a set of top-down trees showing inheritance relationships (although display of aggregation relationships is also possible). A programming team can then log in to the CVE and interact with the program visualisation and each other over a network. Information regarding the program modules is made available on inspection of the "tree", and various design heuristics can be applied to the tree in order to assess the behaviour of the program, shown by highlighting various nodes and links between nodes in different colours.

POODLE is constructed using MASSIVE 2, a CVE system created by Chris Greenhalgh here in the Communications Research Group.

POODLE demonstrates the ability of MASSIVE-2 to aggregate different representations of objects as different graphical entities according to spatial proximity. The view of the structure is determined by one's own spatial relationship with the program structure, as well as spatial relationships with others. POODLE takes advantage of MASSIVE-2's multicasting network support, so that only those designers inhabiting visually shared parts of the environment have their voices and visual actions transmitted to one another. It provides an object-centred navigation mechanism, so that users can select objects to retain in their view, and then navigate that view with respect to those objects.

Click below to view some screen shots of POODLE in use