HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring Meaningful Extended Reality (XR) Experiences: Psychological, Educational, and Data-Driven PerspectivesView all 13 articles
Immersive Sensemaking for Binary Reverse Engineering: A Survey and Synthesis
Provisionally accepted
- Auburn University, Auburn, United States
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Binary reverse engineering (RE) is critical for many use cases but is cognitively demanding, suffering from compounded uncertainty and lack of full automation. We survey and synthesize interdisciplinary research in cognitive systems engineering, reverse engineering, and immersive analytics to explore how virtual reality (VR) can be applied to better support human cognition for the binary RE task. We identify relevant work using a hybrid literature review process consisting of targeted database searches and thematic synthesis. Our survey includes relevant work in cognitive/mental models of RE, related cognitive theories (such as embodied cognition and cognitive load), and affordances in VR tied to those theories. We synthesize the survey findings to identify several conceptual threads spanning the three surveyed areas and cluster those threads into three overarching themes: enhancing abductive iteration, augmenting working memory, and supporting information organization. Each of these themes yields a recommended set of affordances in VR to prioritize in system design and future research. Our work bridges cognitive theory with immersive technology, providing a foundation for innovative reverse engineering environments and similar analytical use cases.
Keywords: Binary reverse engineering, Cognition, Program Comprehension, sensemaking, virtual reality
Received: 16 Apr 2025; Accepted: 12 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Brown, Mulder and Mulder. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Dennis G Brown
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.