2D and 3D visualizations in WikiDev2.0

Several types of 3D software visualizations have been developed to communicate information about the products of a software project and, sometimes, the development process itself. These visualizations have been limited in the degree of interactivity they enabled (primarily panning and zooming) and in their accessibility (since in most cases they assumed a particular client platform). In this paper we discuss our 3D visualization of the data collected and extracted in our collaborative software-development platform WikiDev2.0, developed in the Open Wonderland virtual world. The visualization adopts a city metaphor, similar to earlier work, but advances the state of the art by providing a web-accessible distributed 3D environment where multiple users can explore the same project. In this paper we discuss this visualization, which we call WikiDev3D, and we report on our preliminary findings about its effectiveness against the more traditional visualization of the original WikiDev2.0 tool.