On-line analytical processing while immersed in a CAVE

The paper presents a new approach for interactive visualization of data warehouses and data mining results in an immersed virtual environment. DIVE-ON is a data mining system prototype that is capable of constructing a multidimensional data model on a remote system, transporting pertinent views to a CAVE, creating an immersed virtual environment and providing an interactive data mining toolset. The main objective of this research is to examine the possibility of effective mining, visualizing and manipulating large amounts of distributed multidimensional data with little or no instructional help. To achieve this, DIVE-ON immerses the user in a virtual environment and provides a set of intuitive and effective interaction techniques within the CAVE environment. Intuitiveness was tackled by exploiting the user's considerable natural experience in interacting and navigating through a 3-dimensional world and by understanding the characteristics of a virtual environment that is well suited for the visual analysis of data. The ability to perform OLAP operations intuitively in such an environment provides the user with an effective means to conceptualize and gain an insight into large volumes of data from several distributed sources.