To create a SAFEARRAY variant, you have to specify the VT_ARRAY flag in addition to the variant base type of the array elemnts. In this cases DATA must be a list specifying the dimensions of the array. Each element can be either an element count (indices 0 to count-1) or an array reference pointing to the lower and upper array bounds of this dimension:

        my $Array = Win32::OLE::Variant->new(VT_ARRAY|VT_R8, [1,2], 2);

This creates a 2-dimensional SAFEARRAY of doubles with 4 elements: (1,0), (1,1), (2,0) and (2,1).