Is the 3D model the way to go when presenting microservice architecture?

Software engineers are challenged with maintaining complex systems as the architecture becomes too difficult to understand in a 2D space. As a result, researchers look for system abstractions to help engineers understand the system architecture and its dependencies in both real time and statically. This problem is especially concerning to decentralized systems like those built with microservices. The advancement in the areas of virtual and augmented reality brings interesting directions for coping with complex models abstracting these systems. However, when considering a visual model to represent the system architecture with its dependencies, there are two most obvious options: an intractable two or three-dimensional model (2D/3D). This paper questions the effectiveness of virtual and augmented reality and 3D visual models to improve comprehension. In this paper, we develop two interactive visual models to represent microservice dependency graphs. One model is 2D, and the other is 3D, allowing us to render a microservice system with varying size. We then ask microservice developers questions about the abstracted system, and analyze the pros and cons of these models for the tasks related to system architecture comprehension.