Abstract: Immersive augmented reality (AR) has shown to be beneficial across several domains, e.g., automotive, medicine, and gaming, with positive impacts on cognitive aspects such as collaboration, communication, embodiment. I ask whether these benefits can be transferred to software engineering (SE). I conjecture that the use of immersive AR in SE can promote empathy amongst software engineers by boosting such cognitive aspects. In this talk, I present elicited potentials and obstacles for the use of immersive AR in SE. I identify possible areas that can be supported with AR technology by relating commonly discussed AR improvements to typical SE tasks. Next, I discuss how innovative use of immersive AR technology may fundamentally improve typical activities of a software engineer through a comprehensive series of usage scenarios that outline practical applications. I reflect on current limitations of AR technology based on the described scenarios and sketch research activities necessary to make this vision a reality. Finally, I show a glimpse of this vision by describing a prototype that could be used by software engineers to program situated data visualizations displayed in AR.

Bio: Leonel Merino is a postdoctoral researcher in the Visualization Research Center in the University of Stuttgart. He completed his B.Sc. in the University of Chile in 2006. He received his M.Sc. from the École des Mines de Nantes and Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2008. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bern in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Oscar Nierstrasz. His main research interests are in the intersection of software engineering, information visualization, and virtual/augmented reality.