3D and immersive interfaces for Business Intelligence: the case of 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

We study in this paper the use of a 3D interface for OLAP. We analyze the state of the art in OLAP 3D visualizations. In a first step, we propose a new interface, called VR4OLAP, that combines the relative advantages of the studied methods. VR4OLAP can visualize 3 dimensions of an OLAP data cube and up to two measures. It represents the OLAP operators in the visualization with 3D widgets. It can use a 3D stereoscopic screen with a 3D mouse. In a second step, we perform a user study to evaluate this interface and to compare it with a standard cross-table. We evaluate the technical performances of the 3D interface. We conclude that, for the studied data and methods, 1) users are quite enthusiastic with a 3D representation, 2) the performances in 2D are equal or better than those obtained in 3D, 3) no advantage was found with the use of the 3D immersive setup.

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]

Sebastien Lafon, Fatma Bouali, Christiane Guinot, Gilles Venturini. 3D and immersive interfaces for Business Intelligence: the case of OLAP. 17th International Conference on Information Visualisation, Jul 2013, Londres, United Kingdom. pp.272-277. ⟨hal-01027494⟩