3D Analytics: Opportunities and Guidelines for Information Systems Research

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of 3D analytics in information systems research, providing guidelines, showcases, and opportunities to incorporate 3D data for advancing various IS domains.

Contribution

It offers modeling guidelines, showcases applications, and identifies research opportunities for integrating 3D analytics into IS research, an area previously underexplored.

Findings

Provides two application showcases of 3D analytics in IS

Identifies key research opportunities across multiple IS domains

Lists common research tasks supported by 3D analytics

Abstract

Progress in sensor technologies has made three-dimensional (3D) representations of the physical world available at a large scale. Leveraging such 3D representations with analytics has the potential to advance Information Systems (IS) research in several areas. However, this novel data type has rarely been incorporated. To address this shortcoming, this article first presents two showcases of 3D analytics applications together with general modeling guidelines for 3D analytics, in order to support IS researchers in implementing research designs with 3D components. Second, the article presents several promising opportunities for 3D analytics to advance behavioral and design-oriented IS research in several contextual areas, such as healthcare IS, human-computer interaction, mobile commerce, energy informatics and others. Third, we investigate the nature of the benefits resulting from the application of 3D analytics, resulting in a list of common tasks of research projects that 3D analytics can support, regardless of the contextual application area. Based on the given showcases, modeling guidelines, research opportunities and task-related benefits, we encourage IS researchers to start their journey into this largely unexplored third spatial dimension.