An Extended Reality Approach for Creating Immersive Software Project Workspaces

Software project workspaces are areas of constant project activities across different phases of the software development lifecycle. Besides being physical spaces to house the team members these are also areas of teamwork, creativity and collaboration. It is well established that there are several information and insight needs of software teams (both individual and collective) during the course of any project. Interestingly, the use of the project workspaces themselves for assisting in getting those insights has been almost non-existent and there is little technological support for doing so. Here we present our approach that utilizes advances in extended reality to augment the software project bay with important insights which are anchored on and around real objects in the workspace. The approach is based upon mining the data exhaust (disparate sources of data and logs) of the software project and development environment, for data important to construct insights relevant to an XR headset wearer and the team. The wearer's location and parts of the workspace (floors, furniture, ceilings) are detected in the wearer's field of view and thereon spatial mapping is utilized to overlay important representations of the relevant insights onto/around them. The immersive insights are contextual, can be continuously updated and leverage affordances of human perception, for better comprehension, enhanced creativity as well as recall. Along with our approach, we also present an early Microsoft Hololens based implementation which allows for different categories of live augmentations for creating a smart immersive workspace.