Section: Software

VITRAIL

Participants : Damien Bodenes, Pierre Caserta, Olivier Zendra.

The aim of the VITRAIL operation is to provide tools for the advanced and immersive visualization of programs (see the section about the VITRAIL project, funded by the PRST MISN in this report for more details). It partners with the Université de Montréal and Pareo team of INRIA Nancy Grand Est.

This year, in VITRAIL, we first developed software to instrument and trace Java programs at the bytecode level. We then developed an analysis tool able to exploit these traces to compute relevant software metrics. Finally, we have just finished the development of a back-end tool relying on the traces and computed metrics to generate input for the VERSO visualization tool of the Université de Montréal, in order to really start experimenting on visualizations.

Furthermore, we have recently hired Damien Bodenes as software developer, and have begun working on a prototype able to render a 3D world, symbolizing software, onto various visualization hardware. The first step of this work consists in validating the software technology chosen. We have identified the main functions of our application which are metric extraction, 3D modeling of a chosen metaphor, 3D rendering. So far, we have focused on the last two functions. We evaluated and tested different 3D API (OpenGL/Directx combined with SDL) and concluded that using them directly was not an efficient path. We thus turned to 3D engines which already implement a lot of the rendering functions we need. After evaluating Ogre3D and Irrlicht, we chose the latter and are currently developing a prototype in C++ based on it.

Our next goal is to improve the current prototype and to interface it with a double screen. Using interaction peripherals (like wiimote, 3D navigation mouse,...) will also be evaluated.

An APP release of the VITRAIL software is ongoing.