3D or not 3D?

Abstract

Several recent research systems have provided interactive three-dimensional (3D) visualisations for supporting everyday work such as file and document management. But what improvements do these 3D interfaces offer over their traditional 2D counterparts? This paper describes the comparative evaluation of two document management systems that differ only in the number of dimensions used for displaying and interacting with the data. The 3D system is heavily based on Robertson et al.'s Data Mountain, which supports users in storing, organising and retrieving “thumbnail” representations of documents such as bookmarked Web-pages. Results show that our subjects were faster at storing and retrieving pages in the display when using the 2D interface, but not significantly so. As expected, retrieval times significantly increased as the number of thumbnails increased. Despite the lack of significant differences between the 2D and 3D interfaces, subjective assessments showed a significant preference for the 3D interface.