1. 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 developer- centric and an artifact-centric mode, it captures the activities of each developer and gives a clear visualization of links between developers and artifacts. gmarcu@uci.edu · www.research.calit2.net/students/surf-it2006 · www.calit2.net S ummer U ndergraduate 2 R esearch 0 F ellowship in 0 I nformation 6 T echnology Artifact mode Developer mode 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. The HIPerWall, a massively-tiled display system, not only allows for a more large scale visualization, but as a high resolution 200 mega- pixel 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. 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. 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. Additional Contributions by Roger Ripley and Isabella da Silva Almeida 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. Part of the new OpenGL visualization, reimplemented from the original Java3D.