On studying a 3D user interface for OLAP

Sebastien Lafon (1) , Fatma Bouali , Christiane Guinot (2) , Gilles Venturini (1)

1 LIFAT - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale et Appliquée de Tours
2 CERIES - CENTRE DE RECHERCHES ET D'INVESTIGATIONS EPIDERMIQUES ET SENSORIELLES

In this paper, a new visual and interactive user interface for OLAP is presented, and its strengths and weaknesses examined. A survey on 3D interfaces for OLAP is detailed, which shows that only one interface that uses Virtual Reality has been proposed. Then we present our approach: it consists of a 3D representation of OLAP cubes where many OLAP operators have been integrated and where several measures can be visualized. A 3D stereoscopic screen can be used in conjunction with a 3D mouse. Finally a user study is reported that compares standard dynamic crosstables with our interface on different tasks. We conclude that 3D with stereoscopy is not as promising as expected even with recent 3D devices.

Mots clés: OLAP; 3D interfaces; Visual data mining; User study; Virtual reality

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Sebastien Lafon, Fatma Bouali, Christiane Guinot, Gilles Venturini. On studying a 3D user interface for OLAP. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2013, 27, pp.4-21. ⟨hal-01021082⟩