List of Physical Visualizations
and Related Artifacts
Active physical visualization

1992 – Durrell Bishop's Marble Answering Machine

In 1992, Durrell Bishop, then a student at the Royal College of Art, came up with an original answering machine design that is considered as one of the first tangible user interfaces (TUIs). The machine spits out a marble each time an incoming voice message is recorded. The order of the marbles indicates the order in which the messages arrived. Messages can be played back by putting a marble in a small dent. If the message is for somebody else it can be placed on a small dish to the side that […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: answering machine, design, marble, tangible user interface


2007 – Garden of Eden

Garden of Eden consists of eight lettuces, each of which is enclosed in its own air-tight plexiglas box and represents a major city. The concencration of ozone in each box is controlled in real-time to reflect the current pollution level in the city. Sources: Thorsten Kiesl, Harald Moser, and Timm-Oliver Wilks (2007) Garden of Eden (web page) Thorsten Kiesl, Harald Moser, and Timm-Oliver Wilks (2007) Garden of Eden (paper)

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: air pollution, air quality, cities, plants


2007 – Wable: Web Behavior Shown with a Dynamic Bar Chart

A dynamic bar chart visualizing one's online activity. From the company's website: The personal feeds from webapplications like Plazes, Flickr, and Last.fm tell much about the activity of an individual on the internet. In this project we aim to explore how you can visualize the changes of your web identity over time and create a physical link between your virtual and real identity. The interface consists of both a physical table and a web application. This direct feedback from your web identity […]



2008 – 100% City

Since 2008, the German theater group Rimini Protokoll organizes performances where they select 100 people in such a way that they form a representative sample of a given city, and then invites them on the stage. Each person briefly introduces themselves, after which everyone participates in a series of physical visualizations where each person takes the role of a data point. The first performance was titled 100% Berlin. Similar performances were then organized in 18 other cities between 2010 […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: city, participatory, people


2009 – Leithinger's Interactive Shape Displays

Daniel Leithinger, PhD student at MIT MediaLab and his colleagues, are studying interaction with shape displays. The team designed two impressive shape displays made of arrays of ultra-fast motorized pins. Relief (2009-2010, first row above) is made of 120 motorized pins on top of which can be added a rubber sheet and a projected image. Each pin can be addressed individually and senses user input like pulling and pushing. In 2011, the team extends Relief (later renamed Recompose, second row […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: cartographic, interaction, MIT, shape display


2009 – Centograph: Dynamic Bar Charts Show Keyword Popularity

Ten actuated bar charts that show the popularity of keywords of interest in news articles over time, made by the company Tinker from London. A separate search interface is provided on a regular desktop computer and sends queries to the Google News Archive. It is permanently installed in the St Paul's School for Boys Computing Department in London. Sources: infosthetics Tinker London

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: bar charts, news, temporal data


2009 – DataMorphose: Animated Sails

DataMorphose is an interactive installation which projects various data streams into real space and visualizes it three-dimensionally. Information is represented by spanned and moving sails directly in the room. Source: Christiane Keller (2009). Data Morphose.

Added by: Samuel Huron. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: self-actuated, statistical data


2009 – Poly: Physical Bar Chart Showing Online Poll Data

Poly, a self-actuated bar chart which shows replies to online polls. Sources: Digit, London. Original polling website is down [Oct 2014]; check out an archived version instead.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: data sculpture, online poll, self-actuated


2009 – Pulse: Animated Heart Shows Sentiments

pulse is a live-visualization of recent emotional expressions, written on private weblog communities like blogger.com. Weblog entries are compared to a list of emotions, which refers to Robert Plutchik’s seminal book Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion published in 1980. Plutchik describes eight basic human emotions in his book: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. He developed a diagram in which these eight emotions, together with their weakened and amplified […]

Added by: Samuel Huron. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: emotional responses, self-actuated


2009 – Virtual Gravity: Giving Physical Weight to Data

Virtual gravity is an interface between digital and analog world. With the aid of analog carriers, virtual terms can be taken up and transported from a loading screen to an analog scale. The importance and popularity of these terms (data base: Google Insights for Search), outputted as a virtual weight, can be weighed physically and compared. Therefore impalpable, digital data get an actual physical existence and become a sensually tangible experience. Source: Silke Hilsing (2010) via fubiz

Added by: Samuel Huron. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: data sculpture, online data


2010 – Dust Serenade: Sound Waves Materialized

'Dust Serenade' is a reenactment of an acoustic experiment done by German physicist August Kundt. Inspired by the Chladni's famous sand figures visualizing sound waves in solid materials, Kundt devised an experiment for visualizing longitudinal sound waves through fine lycopodium dust; a setup that would allow him to measure the speed of sound in different gases. Kundt was a strong believer in experimental methods over purely theoretical inquiry in a time when the disciplines of theoretical and […]

Added by: Dietmar Offenhuber. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: sound


2010 – eCLOUD & airFIELD: Ambient Airport Visualizations

Left image: eCLOUD is an airport installation at the San Jose International Airport created by Dan Goods, Nik Hafermaas, and Aaron Koblin. It is made of many large LCD pixels laid out in 3D space whose opacity change as a function of weather. Right image: A similar installation called airFIELD was created by the same team two years later. It shows air traffic and is installed at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. For other examples of non-regular or 3D layouts of physical […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Fanny Chevalier. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: air traffic, hybrid, weather


2010 – Dynamic Bar Chart to Visualize One's Finances

A design project by Swedish designer Hampus Edström to help people keeping an overview of their financial situation. Sources: Hampus Edström, project presentation. Yanko Design blog.



2012 – Point Cloud: A Dynamic Weather Sculpture

James Leng’s ‘Point Cloud‘ consists in a 3D wire structure materializing real-time weather information by moving and undulating. The wire structure is articulated by pistons activating wheels to deform the surface according to data. The structure could be articulated for other types of data than weather forecast. This structure represents a first attempt to build a physical 3D weather forecast system. The speed, smoothness, and direction of rotation are modulated to interpret a live feed of […]

Added by: Jean Vanderdonckt. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: mobile surface, weather


2012 – Pulse: Tangible Line Graph

Pulse is a tangible line graph. It is composed of a string whose position is changed with six servo motors. By tilting the device, one can change between three information feeds. Pulse was created by designers Jon McTaggert and Christian Ferrara. Source: Christian Ferrara and Jon McTaggert, cargocollective.com/Pulse

Added by: Jennifer Payne. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: dynamic, line graph


2012 – Chaotic Flow: Abstract Flow Visualization of Copenhagen Bike Traffic

Biking is the transport form of choice in Copenhagen, Denmark. The city is equipped with generous bike lanes and the municipality put up counters at some check points to get a better estimate of the thousands of cyclists coming through every hour. Tobias Lukassen, Halfdan Hauch Jensen and Johan Bichel Lindegaard from Illutron Collaborative Interactive Art Studio used this data to create the above depicted abstract visualization of the city's bike traffic for the 4S / EASST joint conferences in […]

Added by: Yvonne Jansen. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: bike traffic, data sculpture


2012 – PARM: Static Terrain Models with Projection

The PARM system is part of an ongoing research project at the University of Nottingham. A static physical relief model is augmented with top projection to display landscape details and to overlay with additional data visualizations. Sources: James Goulding's project page. Pristnall et al (2012). Projection Augmented Relief Models (PARM): Tangible Displays for Geographic Information.

Added by: Yvonne Jansen, sent by: Stuart Reeves. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: cartographic, hybrid, solid terrain model, top projection


2012 – Emoto: Projection Augmented Heatmaps of Twitter Data

The core of the install­a­tion is a phys­ical data sculp­ture consisting of 17 objects, each repres­enting all Tweets we have collected during one day of the Olympics. Mapped onto this phys­ical sculp­ture we have then projected indi­vidual heat maps for the most inter­esting themes we have iden­ti­fied while observing emoto during the Games. Users were able to navigate through these themes using an inter­active controller and thus explore our archive. Source: Moritz Stefaner, Drew Hemment […]

Added by: Yvonne Jansen, sent by: Fanny Chevalier - Romain Vuillemot. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: data sculpture, heatmap, online data


2013 – Solar Radiation Dowsing Rod

The Solar Radiation Dowsing Rod is a device created for a space observatory that allows visitors to point it towards the sky and feel, through light, vibration and sound, the level of radiation coming from that direction. The rod enables people to perceive data only during interaction (as data is not encoded in the shape of the artifact, but rather experienced through it). ”[…] crossmodal data-driven artefacts that represent live data streams using haptic-auditory feedback. The motivation for […]

Added by: Vinicius Sueiro. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: nonvisual, haptic-auditory, solar radiation


2013 – Tidal Memory

Tidal Memory displays the evolving daily tide at full scale. Receiving live data from the oldest tide station in the western hemisphere, twenty-four water-filled glass columns function as a tidal clock and 24-hour sculptural archive; recording a full day of hourly tide levels starting at midnight. 26’L x 2.5’W x 10’H - Glass, stainless steel, water, custom electronics. Tidal Memory is permanently exhibited at the Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA. Source: Charles Sowers (creator), […]

Added by: Jeff Pettiross. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: sea, tides, water


2013 – Pneumatic Charts

The Hive Big Data Think Tank at Palo Alto created a device for visualizing city data (power, waste, demographic, transportation) using blowers, microcontrollers and ping pongs balls. Sources: Lance Riedel, Christophe Briguet, Srinivas Doddi, Daniel Schwartz, Pashu Christensen, The Hive @City Camp Palo Alto for the National Day of Civic Hacking! Svetlana Sicular (2013) Now Open.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic, sent by: Benjamin Bach. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: city data, ping pong ball, pneumatic


2013 – Season in Review: iPad + Physical Charts Show Baseball Stats

Baseball stats for an entire season created by Teehan+Lax labs as a combination of an interactive ipad app with an overlay of physical charts cut from acrylic. Depending on the current choice in the app, the edges of different charts get highlighted by the ipad. Source: Teehan+Lax labs & vimeo.

Added by: Yvonne Jansen, sent by: Samuel Huron. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: baseball, digital fabrication, hybrid, laser cutting, line charts, tablet, temporal data


2014 – #Good vs. #Evil

A race is going on between two Twitter hashtags, materialized by two cars. The blue car represents #Good, the red car represents #Evil. Source: Patrick Keller (2014). I&IC Workshop #3 at ECAL: output > “Botcaves” / Networked Data Objects.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: cars, robots, toys, tweets


2014 – x.pose: a Wearable Dynamic Data Sculpture

x.pose is a dynamic wearable data sculpture that makes the collection of the wearer's location data visible in real-time in the physical world. From the project webpage: x.pose is a wearable data-driven sculpture that exposes a person's skin as a real-time reflection of the data that the wearer is producing. In the physical realm we can deliberately control which portions our bodies are exposed to the world by covering it with clothing. In the digital realm, we have much less control of what […]



2014 – Drip-By-Tweet: Each Vote is a Drop

Team of developers Domestic Data Streamers created a real-time physical visualization of votes for a graphic design contest. A person can vote for a specific piece by sending a tweet, after which the machine releases a drop of yellow liquid and sends it to the corresponding test tube. Source: Domestic Data Streamers.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: liquid, participatory, streaming, tweets, votes


2014 – Dynamic Physical Charts Display Community Data

David Sweeney from Microsoft Research designed these beautiful, mechanically driven, physical charts to communicate data to people living or working on Tenison Road in Cambridge, UK. The charts are part of a research project to explore what is the general public’s understanding of data and how it can be used to improve the life at street level - be that, better access to services, improving social relationships, better engaging with local governance, etc. Beyond making data more eye catching […]

Added by: Yvonne Jansen, sent by: David Sweeney. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: bar chart, communication, pie chart


2015 – Wage Islands

The "Wage Islands" installation by Ekene Ijeoma makes clever use of water as a data query device. Wage Islands is an interactive installation which submerges a topographic map of NYC underwater to visualize where low-wage workers can afford to rent. Sources: Ekene Ijeoma: Wage Islands Huffington Post: Dazzling Interactive 3-D Artwork Visualizes The Tragic Affordable Housing Crisis In New York City Creators: Turning New York's Salary Gap into an Interactive Sculpture Design Boom: Wage islands […]

Added by: Cedric Honnet, sent by: Cheng Xu. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: cartographic, digital fabrication, physical computation, water


2015 – Passim: Visual Reconceptualisation of Spatial Theories

The master thesis of Paul Heinicker, Passim, visually reflects the humanistic discourse about space. The research of spatial theory led to four major notions how to think space from a sociopolitical perspective. The installation explores the relationship of these four spatial notions by projecting visualisations of geopolitical data from the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research onto the physical sculpture. Eventually, different world-views are created, that show how notions […]



2015 – Physical Weather Display

Japanese Software engineer Ken Kawamoto invented the Tempescope, a device that displays weather forecasts or current weather physically. The Tempescope physically simulates weather forecasts via a wireless connection from a computer or a smartphone in real-time in order to get a better idea of what the actual weather is outside. Raining is simulated by water dripping down the box, temperature is represented by color-chaning LEDs and cloudiness is conveyed by a mist diffuser. Source: Dovas […]

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic & Jean Vanderdonckt, sent by: Lora Oehlberg. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: weather


2016 – Dataponics: Human-Vegetal Play

“Dataponics: Human-Vegetal Play” maps human physical activity measured by a Fitbit to the amount of light and water fed to a potted plant. Also, the system measures the moisture in the growing hydroponic medium (in this case, expanded clay) that surrounds the plant’s roots, and plays different internet radio stations accordingly. Source: Cercos, R., Nash, A., Yuille, J., Goddard, W. (2016) Coupling quantified bodies: affective possibilities of self-quantification beyond the self

Added by: Robert Cercos. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: plants, self-logging


2016 – Actuated Prism Map of Italy

This actuated prism map was created by Alessandro Masserdotti in the OpenDot Fablab in Milan, Italy, for the SOD16 meeting and invites people explicitly to Touch That Data. OpenDot Fablab (Milan) project with Arduino and 3D printing visualizes regional statistics changing the height of each region. In the picture there's the building count from the regional extracts. Sources: Open streetmap wiki, 2016. Video from a demo at OSMIT 2016.

Added by: Yvonne Jansen, sent by: Jason Dykes. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: 3d printing, cartographic, digital fabrication, prism map


2016 – FizViz: A Wall-Mounted Data Gauge

Maker project by iot design shop of a clock-like physical visualization device. "The concept is that you'd hang a set of FizViz widgets in your office, workshop, or wherever you want to watch and share data that matters" Source: FizViz - Large Scale Physical Visualizations for your Stats! (video)

Added by: Aurélien Tabard, sent by: Romain Vuillemot. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: ambient display, clock, gauge


2016 – Podium: Physical Competition Monitor

Podium is an internet connected device that uses real-time social data to show comparative rankings of a brand’s performance versus their competitors. Developed in a partnership between iSketchLab and TrackMaven, Podium is a physical device that pulls Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter data from airline brands and offers an snapshot overview of the brands' performance on social media. Sources: Podium

Added by: Aurélien Tabard. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: business, social media


2017 – Yellow Dust: Making Visible Particulate Matter in the Air

A three-dimensional water vapor canopy; Yellow Dust is a sensing and sensuous infrastructure that monitors, makes visible and partially remediates particulate matter in the air through variable clouds of yellow mist. Composed by Do It Yourself sensors and using off-the shelf construction systems, it aims to contribute to collective forms of making air pollution visible. In contrast to scientific and policy making versions of air monitoring, where the devices remain invisible and sensing only […]

Added by: HS. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: air quality, pollution


2017 – Damião's Dataphys Project

A project that communicates information in a beautiful and unusual way. Using simple features, Evandro Damião a data intelligence professional from Brazil creates a project that allows even blind people to interact with graphics through audio, braille, acrylic and a lot of creativity. Visualization and physicalization are not the secrets to communicating data, they are only some aspects that must be transcended. Source: Evandro Damião (2017) The Dataphys Project. Also see our entry 2013 - […]

Added by: Evandro Damião Barbosa. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: blind, hybrid, tablet


2018 – CairnFORM: a Physical Ring Chart Showing Renewable Energy Data

CairnFORM is a stack of expandable illluminated rings for display that can change of cylindrical shape (e.g., cone, double cone, bicone, cylinder, spheroid). CairnFORM can be used as a dynamic physical ring chart for encoding 360°-readable data: we use it for encoding forecast data about renewable energy availability in collective and public spaces, such as public places and workplaces. Source: Maxime Daniel, Guillaume Rivière, and Nadine Couture (2019) CairnFORM: a Shape-Changing Ring Chart […]



2018 – Living Map: Precipitation Visualized with Moss

Climate change is a very hot topic nowadays. We are facing extreme weather events more and more frequently. Unusual temperatures, excess rainfall or extremely strong winds, forest fires disrupt our habitual life. The LIVING MAP visualizes the change of summertime rainfall in Europe. A precipitation data comes from the European Environmental Agency. The data was derived using climate simulation model. It compares summer precipitation in the period 1971-2000 and 2071-2100. The simulation of […]

Added by: Sigitas Guzauskas. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: cartographic, climate change, moss, plants, precipitation


2018 – The Long Run: Marble Runs Convey Cost of Health Care

An artwork that represents the cost of health care for different age groups, based on the time it takes for a marble to fall. Each of the 7 runs represents a different decade of life, and the length of the runs presents the average cost of care to the UK's National Health Service, for a person in that year of their life. Each run is constructed from medical equipment. It was commissioned by the British Medical Association and the British Medical Journal to mark the NHS's 70th Birthday on the 5 […]

Added by: Will Stahl-Timmins. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: health, interactive, marble, marble run, timed


2018 – ON BRINK: Live Physicalization of the Bitcoin Blockchain

ON BRINK is a physical data visualisation of the Bitcoin blockchain: Adapting the mining metaphor, it encodes data on blocks appended to the chain in real-time. It produces piles of soil that relate in size to the number of transactions within a block, and displays six of them at a time on a continuous conveyor system, thus reflecting the human attention span given to a transaction on the blockchain: A transaction counts as confirmed after five blocks have been appended to its containing block. […]

Added by: Dustin Stupp. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: bitcoin, blockchain, conveyor, installation, soil


2019 – Anamorphic Data Spatialization

Data spatialization is a design technique through which data is used to create architectural spaces. It does not necessarily preserve the legibility of the represented data, but rather focuses on the spatial qualities that can be gained from the data. This research aims to introduce a method for the design of a data-driven pavilion that represents data spatially through catoptric (mirror-assisted) anamorphosis. In this work, a set of environmental datasets from North America–including […]

Added by: Hessam Djavaherpour. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: anamorphosis, cartographic, Pavilion, public


2020 – LOOP: Ambient Visualization of Personal Activity

   LOOP is a physical artifact that changes its shape according to the activity data of the owner, providing an abstract visualization. The artifact consists of eight rings, of which seven represent weekdays from small to large, and the outermost ring represents the step goal. When the owner is active, the ring representing the current weekday moves upwards and positions itself in relation to the step goal ring. LOOP was used to investigate how an alternative approach to representing […]



2020 – Econundrum: Visualizing the Climate Impact of Dietary Choices

Econundrum is a shared physical system, designed to visualize the carbon emissions as a result of dietary choices. People of a community can indicate on their phone what food types they ate that day, which will be visualized on the physical installation. Every disk represents the impact of one person, and its elevation indicates the level of impact: higher is fewer carbon emissions, lower is more carbon emissions. The highlighted food types visualize how the 'foodprint' of each person is […]



2021 – Watermap: A Physical Live Weather Visualization

Without water, nothing organic exists. This water installation visualizes - symbolically - how rain brings the whole world to life. In a very tangible way of presenting and visualizing data, rain is represented by real drops of water. The installation features a black, wooden pedestal with a recessed world map filled with sand. Technically, the realization is done by a mini-computer, which evaluates live weather data and positions a water tank in an X-Y system above the world map. At places […]

Added by: Daniel Fischer. Category: Active physical visualization  Tags: weather, rain, water, sand, cartographic