On studying a 3D user interface for OLAP

• Published in: Data mining and knowledge discovery Vol. 27; no. 1; pp. 4 - 21
• Main Authors: Lafon, Sébastien, Bouali, Fatma, Guinot, Christiane, Venturini, Gilles
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01-07-2013; Springer Nature B.V; Springer
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Chemistry and Earth Sciences; Computer Science; Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Data mining; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Devices; Human-Computer Interaction; Information Storage and Retrieval; OLAP; Physics; Representations; Statistics for Engineering; Stereoscopy; Three dimensional; User interface; User interfaces; Virtual reality; Visualization; 3D interfaces; OLAP; Visual data mining; User study; Virtual reality
• ISSN: 1384-5810; 1573-756X
• DOI: 10.1007/s10618-012-0279-5

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 cross-tables with our interface on different tasks. We conclude that 3D with stereoscopy is not as promising as expected even with recent 3D devices.