3D and Immersive Interfaces for Business Intelligence: The Case of OLAP

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.