Distributed systems are very complex and in case of errors hard to debug. The high number of messages with non deterministic delivery timings, as well as message losses, data corruption and node crashes cannot be efficiently analyzed with traditional GUI tools. We propose to use immersive technologies in a multi-display environment to tackle these shortcomings. Our DebugAR approach shows a representation of the current systems state, message provenance, and the lifetime of participating nodes and offers layouting techniques. By providing a screen that shows a traditional text-log, we bridge the gap to conventional tools. Additionally, we propose an interactive 3D visualization of the message flow, combining an interactive tabletop with augmented reality using a head-mounted display. We are confident that our proposed solution can not only be used to analyze distributed system, but also for other timedependent networks.

Publications

  • DebugAR: Mixed Dimensional Displays for Immersive Debugging of Distributed Systems.

    Reipschläger, P.; Ozkan, B.; Mathur, A.; Gumhold, S.; Majumdar, R.; Dachselt, R.;

    In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems.CHI '18, Montreal, QC, Canada.ACM,2018.

    @inproceedings{DebugAR_Reipschlaeger18,
       author = {Patrick Reipschl\"{a}ger and Burcu Kulahcioglu Ozkan and Aman Shankar Mathur and Stefan Gumhold and Rupak Majumdar and Raimund Dachselt},
       title = {DebugAR: Mixed Dimensional Displays for Immersive Debugging of Distributed Systems},
       booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
       series = {CHI EA '18},
       year = {2018},
       month = {4},
       location = {Montreal, QC, Canada},
       numpages = {6},
       url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3188679},
       publisher = {ACM},
       address = {New York, NY, USA},
       keywords = {Distributed Systems, Debugging, Augmented Reality, Interactive Surfaces, Multi-display Environments, 3D Visualizations}
    }