Virtual Reality in Software Engineering: Affordances, Applications, and Challenges

Software engineers primarily interact with source code using a keyboard and mouse, and typically view software on a small number of 2D monitors. This interaction paradigm does not take advantage of many affordances of natural human movement and perception. Virtual reality (VR) can use these affordances more fully than existing developer environments to enable new creative opportunities and potentially result in higher productivity, lower learning curves, and increased user satisfaction. This paper describes the affordances offered by VR, demonstrates the benefits of VR and software engineering in prototypes for live coding and code review, and discusses future work, open questions, and the challenges of VR.