Immersion vs. familiarity: A controlled experiment of software evolution visualization in virtual reality

Abstract Understanding how software systems evolve over time is a key challenge in software engineering. While traditional tools like GitHub offer detailed access to project history, their interface can be fragmented and cognitively demanding. Immersive environments, by contrast, offer new opportunities to visualize software evolution in ways that leverage spatial reasoning and embodied interaction. In this paper, we present a controlled experiment comparing an immersive virtual reality (VR) vis