Gallery of Physical Visualizations
and Related Artifacts
This is a chronological gallery of physical visualizations and related artifacts, maintained by Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen. Thanks to our contributors. If you know of another interesting physical visualization, please submit it!  
This list currently has 372 entries. You can also get notified of new entries through Twitter.

30000 BC – The Very First Sculptures

5500 BC – Mesopotamian Clay Tokens

2600 BC – Quipus

1600 BC – Water Clocks

500 BC – Pebble Voting

150 BC – Greek Orrery

132 – Chinese Seismoscope

1200 – Pop-Up and Movable Books

1500 – Flow Visualization

1500 – Plans-Reliefs

1660 – Galileo Thermometer

1700 – Wearable Abacus from the Qing Dynasty

1714 – Mercury Thermometer

1750 – George Adams' Solid Geometry Models

1753 – Barbeu-Dubourg's Machine Chronologique

1787 – Chladni Plates

1820 – Papier-Mâché Anatomical Models

1839 – Théodore Olivier's String Models

1850 – Merryweather's Leech Barometer

1862 – De Chancourtois' Telluric Screw

1862 – Marshall Islands Stick Charts

1865 – Hofmann's Croquet Ball Models

1866 – Kundt's Tube

1866 – Dewar's Brass Strip Models

1871 – Thermodynamic Surfaces

1875 – Van't Hoff's Molecular Paper Models

1880 – Winogradsky Columns

1880 – Klein's Mathematical Plaster Models

1885 – Ammassalik Wooden Maps

1887 – Marey's Movement Sculptures

1889 – Gaudí's Hanging Chain Models

1890 – Polynesian Genealogical Instrument

1896 – James Ive's Mechanical Teaching Map

1897 – Stop Motion Animation

1898 – Crookes' Vis Generatrix

1898 – Tallies Used as Social Displays on Pacific Islands

1900 – Pearson and Lee's Height Correlation Chart

1900 – Crum Brown's Mathematical Surface

1900 – Modern Solid Terrain Modeling

1901 – Davenport's Physical Distributions

1907 – Pin Maps

1913 – Frankfurt Streetcar Load

1914 – Solid 3D Curves for Engineering

1915 – Wire Models of Factory Worker Movements

1920 – Yakama Time Ball

1926 – Karsten's Tridimensional Chart

1930 – Mathematical Functions Embodied in Ballistic Cams

1933 – IBM's Cosmograph

1934 – Hayward's Moon Model

1934 – Ford's Globe

1935 – 3D Visualizations of Power Consumption

1939 – Map of Great Britain's Marine Trade

1940s – Stedman's 3D Periodic Table

1941 – Traffic Flow Profiles of the Interregional Highway System

1945 – Electron Density Map and Molecular Model of Penicillin

1947 – Dorothy Hodgkin's Electron Density Contours

1949 – Mississippi River Basin Model

1949 – Moniac: A Hydromechanical Machine to Teach Economics

1951 – Electricity Generated or Demanded

1951 – Microtiter Plates

1953 – Watson and Crick's 3D Model of DNA

1957 – US Army Corps of Engineers San Francisco Bay Model

1957 – Proteine Visualizations

1960 – 3D Spectrogram

1961 – Voskhod Spacecraft 'Globus' IMP navigation instrument

1965 – Stop Motion Animation of Physical 3D Map

1968 – Grace Hopper's Nanoseconds

1968 – Charles Csuri's Numeric Milling Sculpture

1968 – Jacques Bertin's Reorderable Matrices

1970 – Byron's Bender

1970 – MoMA Poll: Participatory Bar Chart

1970 – 3D Sankey Diagram

1973 – Mazamet Ville Morte

1977 – Graphical Waterfall

1979 – Great Polish Map of Scotland

1984 – Dewdney's Analog Gadgets

1985 – Using the Physical to Explain the Virtual

1987 – All the Submarines of the United States of America

1991 – Münster Congestion Visualization

1992 – Durrell Bishop's Marble Answering Machine

1992 – Tactile Infographics

1993 – Slumber: Brainwave Weaving

1995 – San Diego TeleManufacturing Facility

1995 – Loren Madsen's Early Data Sculptures

1996 – Ned Kahn's Wind-Visualizing Facades

1997 – Level: Hans Hemmert's Same-Height Shoes

1999 – World's Largest Solid Terrain Model

2000 – A Shape Display Appears in a Movie

2000 – Kanban Boards

2000 – Graph Boards

2002 – Bathsheba Grossman's Crystal Engravings

2003 – Pattern Recognition in a Bucket

2003 – Time Pieces: Physical Space-Time Cubes

2003 – Solid Terrain Model with Airplane Trajectory

2004 – Worry (Prayer) Beads

2004 – Of All the People in All the World: Stats with Rice

2004 – Array of Belts Visualize Public Presence

2004 – Synaptic Caguamas: Visualize Cellular Automata

2004 – Cylinder: Early Sound Sculpture

2004 – Scripps' Molecule Models

2004 – XenoVision Mark III: A Dynamic Solid Terrain Model

2004 – Full-Color 3D-Printed Scientific Visualizations

2005 – Molecular Jewellery

2005 – Time-Evolving Scatterplot

2005 – Tactile Rubik’s Cubes

2006 – Clebsch Cubic Surface

2006 – Peter Jansen's Movement Sculptures

2006 – RoomQuake: Earthquake Visualization for the Classroom

2006 – Pulse Room: Light Bulbs Show Heart Beats

2007 – Garden of Eden

2007 – Wavefunction: Visualize Public Presence in Waves

2007 – Explosion of Sound Sculptures

2007 – Global Cities: Elevation Maps of City Population

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

2008 – 100% City

2008 – Psychogeographical Mapping: Travel Logging with LEGO bricks

2008 – Activity Logging with LEGO Bricks

2008 – BMW Kinetic Sculpture

2008 – Andreas Fischers' Data Sculptures

2008 – Scientific Visualization in Crystal

2009 – How Much Sugar do you Consume?

2009 – Federal Budget Explained with 10,000 Pennies

2009 – Windcuts: Wind Travels Captured on Wood

2009 – Marcovici's Single-Datum Visualizations

2009 – Leithinger's Interactive Shape Displays

2009 – Mitchell Whitelaw's Weather Sculptures

2009 – Centograph: Dynamic Bar Charts Show Keyword Popularity

2009 – Distribution Plushies

2009 – DataMorphose: Animated Sails

2009 – S-XL CAKE: Irregular Cake Mold

2009 – Pulse: Animated Heart Shows Sentiments

2009 – Virtual Gravity: Giving Physical Weight to Data

2010 – and Counting... Tattoo of War Casualties

2010 – Computer Glitches as 3D Objects

2010 – Cookbook Arranges Ingredients into Physical Visualizations

2010 – Retweet Ripples

2010 – Quipu of the Periodic Table

2010 – Dust Serenade: Sound Waves Materialized

2010 – Data Sculptures in Class

2010 – Hans Rosling Adopts Physical Visualizations

2010 – Thematic Maps of Germany

2010 – Shanghai Spheres

2010 – Headspace: Array of Actuated Bars

2010 – eCLOUD & airFIELD: Ambient Airport Visualizations

2010 – Limbique: Brain Slices

2010 – Relational Ornaments: Networks Shown with Textile

2011 – Digital Arab Spring

2011 – Ursus Wehrli's Art of Clean Up

2011 – Sleep Patterns

2011 – Blip: A Year of Travel

2011 – Manually Animated Graph of Scientific Data

2011 – Jose Duarte's Handmade Visualization Toolkit

2011 – Stephen Barrass' Physical Data Sonifications

2011 – Tape Recorders: Time-Measuring Tapes

2011 – Warning: Real Time Global Air Quality Display

2011 – Adrien Segal's Data Furniture

2011 – Laser-Cut Time Series

2011 – David Bowen's Sea Wave Replicators

2011 – DataCoaster: Data-Driven Toys

2011 – DIY United States Electoral Vote Map

2011 – From Over Here: News Trends

2011 – LEGO Prism Maps

2012 – A Soft and Transparent Handleable Protein Model

2012 – Stop & Frisk: Physical Data Filtering

2012 – What made me

2012 – Point Cloud: A Dynamic Weather Sculpture

2012 – Bit Planner - LEGO calendar

2012 – Pulse: Tangible Line Graph

2012 – Google Eye: Radial Visualization of Page Visits

2012 – Grand Old Party: Political Satire

2012 – Data Cuisine

2012 – Slime Mold Imitates the United States Interstate System

2012 – Pulse Drip: Visualize Heartbeats with a Water Hose

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

2012 – Large-Scale Drone Swarm

2012 – Dynamic Network Sculpture

2012 – Rearrangeable 3D Bar Chart

2012 – Putting Physical Visualizations to the Test

2012 – Matthijs Klip's Data Sculptures

2012 – PARM: Static Terrain Models with Projection

2012 – Thesis LEGO Board

2012 – All Possible Photons: Steel Feynman Diagrams

2012 – Emoto: Projection Augmented Heatmaps of Twitter Data

2012 – Hypermatrix: Animated Matrix-Walls

2013 – Solar Radiation Dowsing Rod

2013 – Tidal Memory

2013 – State Of The Union

2013 – Pop-Up Infographics

2013 – Temperature Scarves and Afghans

2013 – 3D Spherical Visualization with Aural Sonification

2013 – Releases

2013 – Doug McCune's Physical Maps

2013 – Walkable Age Pyramid

2013 – Population Density Emerging from Walls

2013 – Programmable Matter Stars in a Movie

2013 – Punchcard Economy: Data Knitting

2013 – Loci: 3D Printed Sculptures of Your Flights

2013 – 3D Social Networks

2013 – Motion Structures: Videos as Space-Time Objects

2013 – Flip Books Rather Than Movies

2013 – Data Sculpture of Chicken Inbreeding

2013 – Pneumatic Charts

2013 – Very Pointy Elevation Map

2013 – Robot Arranges 8,000 Nails Into a Data Sculpture of the Wind

2013 – Behavioral Landscapes

2013 – Line Charts of Cortisol Levels

2013 – Quickly Authoring Physical Visualizations

2013 – SweatAtoms: Physical Activity Sculptures

2013 – Network of the German Civil Code

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

2013 – Layered 2D Plots

2013 – NYC High School Dropouts

2013 – Solid Statistics

2014 – 3D Interest Rate Surface

2014 – Data Sculpture in the White House

2014 – WeatherWindow

2014 – Mount Saint Helens - Pre and Post Eruption

2014 – Lego Senate

2014 – Rearrangeable Display of Ice Data

2014 – Sound Bites

2014 – #Good vs. #Evil

2014 – Made By Numbers

2014 – x.pose: a Wearable Dynamic Data Sculpture

2014 – Silver Ring Shaped by DNA Profile

2014 – Data Storytelling with LEGOs

2014 – District 5: Tube Charts Reveal Decline in Violence

2014 – DIY Bertin Matrix

2014 – Physical Visual Sedimentation

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

2014 – Data Strings: Physical Parallel Coordinates

2014 – Data Clothing: Dresses Show Air Pollution

2014 – TiltWatch: Physical Tilt Indicator For Shipping Goods

2014 – Cosmos: Carbon Exchange Captured in a Wooden Ball

2014 – Dynamic Physical Charts Display Community Data

2014 – Abyss Table - Scale Model of Deep Sea as Furniture

2014 – Data Crystals: Conglomerated World Stats

2014 – 888,246 Ceramic Poppies to Commemorate Fallen Soldiers in WW1

2014 – Pan-Anthem: Visualize Statistics Using National Anthems

2014 – Building Visualizations with Tokens

2014 – Light Painting Acceleration

2014 – Water Works: Maps of the San Francisco Water Infrastructure

2014 – Sphere Packing: Visualize Composers' Total Musical Production

2014 – People Wood: Data Sculpture of Questionnaire Data

2015 – Quantum of Peace: Numerical Display Made with Bullets

2015 – Rearrangeable Physical Map

2015 – Wage Islands

2015 – Life in Clay: Sharing Memories through Data Pottery

2015 – U.S. Unemployment Rate 1948-2015

2015 – Summer in the City

2015 – Dataseeds: Flying Data

2015 – Participatory Representation of Happiness

2015 – Jller: A Robot Rearranges Pebbles by Geologic Age

2015 – Create your own Sound Sculpture

2015 – Inequalities Quipu

2015 – Lake Brite: Ecological Data on a LED Cube

2015 – Passim: Visual Reconceptualisation of Spatial Theories

2015 – U.S. Cost of Political Campaigns

2015 – Canadian Federal Election Explained with LEGOs

2015 – Kohei Nakajima's Computing Tentacle

2015 – Dan Gilbert's TV Ads

2015 – Beeswax Maps Crafted by Bees

2015 – 3D Paper Model of Shrinking Aral Sea

2015 – Multivariate Beer

2015 – London Eye Chart: A 135m Tall Donut Chart

2015 – Physical Weather Display

2015 – Paper Cut Terrain Models

2015 – Interregional Merchandise Trade

2015 – Sicherheit: Switzerland's Money in Bar Charts

2015 – Touching Air: Necklace Shows Air Pollution

2015 – Solid Model of Stellar Winds

2015 – Data Necklace of Good Night SMS

2015 – Physical Customer Satisfaction Survey

2016 – Woven Chronicles

2016 – Accomplishments

2016 – Thoughtforms: 3D-Printed Thoughts

2016 – Walkable Collaboration Network

2016 – Cairn: Situated Data Collection and Analysis for Fab Labs

2016 – Dataponics: Human-Vegetal Play

2016 – Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart

2016 – Actuated Prism Map of Italy

2016 – FizViz: A Wall-Mounted Data Gauge

2016 – Motus Forma: People's Motions in a Shared Space

2016 – Turning Weight into Scale

2016 – Central Park NYC Temperatures

2016 – Podium: Physical Competition Monitor

2017 – CNC-Milled Wood Visualization of a Studio's Energy Usage

2017 – Fabricating Physical Globe Visualizations

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

2017 – Data Sculpture of Latin American Apprehensions

2017 – Participatory Matrix and Parallel Coordinates

2017 – Popsicles of Pollution

2017 – Gravity Wave Spectrogram - LIGO

2017 – Street Debaters

2017 – Green Berlin

2017 – The All Too Evident Ashtray

2017 – Are you Sure you Want to Smoke?

2017 – CO2 Emissions Shown with Balloons

2017 – Animals Tracking

2017 – Damião's Dataphys Project

2017 – Coral Reefs

2017 – Wearable Self

2017 – EuroGums: Edible Population Pyramids

2017 – Hand-Crafted Magazine Infographics

2018 – The 20 Year Gap

2018 – Landscaper: 3D Printing and Assembling of Terrain Models

2018 – Harassment Plants

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

2018 – Traveling Datavis Game

2018 – Stretch Orchestra Marble Run

2018 – DayDohViz: Data Visualizations made with Play-Doh

2018 – Anthropocene Footprints

2018 – Solving the Shortest Route Problem with a 3D Printer

2018 – Phylogenetic Tree with Real Specimens

2018 – Living Map: Precipitation Visualized with Moss

2018 – Inequality in Chile Represented with LEGO Bricks

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

2018 – ON BRINK: Live Physicalization of the Bitcoin Blockchain

2018 – Multimaterial Printing of Volumetric Scientific Visualizations

2018 – Spanish Dictionary Cemetery

2018 – Steven Pinker explains Global Life Expectancy with Physical Line Charts

2019 – Data Beyond Vision: Physicalizing Bookshop Data

2019 – Physical Violin Plot

2019 – Data Earrings of Country Happiness

2019 – Perpetual Plastic

2019 – Anamorphic Data Spatialization

2019 – Physicalizing Cardiac Blood Flow Data

2019 – Tattoo Biosensors

2019 – Sleep Blanket

2019 – Hostile Terrain 94: Deaths at the US/Mexico Border

2019 – New Worry Beads: Deaths from Terrorism

2019 – Self Knitted Scarf of Train Delays

2020 – Ownership: Occlusions, Night Terrors, and Pernicious Doubt

2020 – Data Badges

2020 – LOOP: Ambient Visualization of Personal Activity

2020 – The Anatomical Edutainer

2020 – Slice and Dice: A Physicalization Workflow for Anatomical Edutainment

2020 – COVID-19 Deaths as Nails

2020 – I am a Book. I am a Portal to the Universe.

2020 – Venous Materials

2020 – Econundrum: Visualizing the Climate Impact of Dietary Choices

2021 – State of the World as Population Pyramids

2021 – Walkable Bar Chart

2021 – Watermap: A Physical Live Weather Visualization

2021 – Personal Data Physicalizations in Class

2022 – Edo, a participatory data physicalization of the climate impact of dietary choices

2025 – Digitally-Fabricated Visualizations of the Future

2033 – Cetonia: Drone Swarm Visualizations

2060 – Programmable Matter