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 […]

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 is customizable and can be connected to any RSS feed. Update: What you see is the first prototype version of Wable. We are currently building version 2 so keep an eye on our blog or sign up below to find out when it's released and ready for sale. Source: Physical Interaction Lab (2007). Wable.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Active physical visualization Tags: extruded 2d, online community data, personal information management, pragmatic, self-actuated

2008 – BMW Kinetic Sculpture

The Kinetic Sculpture is a metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding in art and design. 714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires attached to individually-controlled stepper motors and covering the area of six square meters, animate a seven minute long mechatronic narrative. In the beginning, moving chaotically, then evolving to several competing forms that eventually resolve to the finished object, the kinetic sculpture creates an artistic visualisation of the process of […]

The Kinetic Sculpture is a metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding in art and design. 714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires attached to individually-controlled stepper motors and covering the area of six square meters, animate a seven minute long mechatronic narrative. In the beginning, moving chaotically, then evolving to several competing forms that eventually resolve to the finished object, the kinetic sculpture creates an artistic visualisation of the process of form-finding in different variations. Source: Art+Com. Kinetic Scultpture (2008)

Added by: Yvonne Jansen. Category: Enabling technology Tags: 3D, data sculpture, self-actuated

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 […]

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 counterparts, form a three dimensional cone, consisting of 24 areas. The cone is the basic form of pulse, which can enlarge in the 24 directions of the different emotions. Each time an emotion tag, or a synonym of it, is found in a recent blog entry, the shape-shifting object transforms itself in such a way that the new volume represents a piece of the overall current emotional condition of surfers on the Internet. Source: Markus Kison (2009). Pulse.

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

2010 – Shanghai Spheres

For the 2010 World Expo at Shangai, Japanese firms ADK and Murayama and Las-Vegas firm Fisher Technical Services, Inc. created an array of 1,008 15cm diameter actuated spheres, each suspended by its own micro winch. The show does not include data visualizations. Kinetic sculptures made of arrays of suspended spheres abound. An early one is Joe Gilbertson's (2007). More recent ones include Kinetic Rain (2012) and Triptych (2014). Also check BMW's Kinetic Sculpture (2008) on this list. Source: […]

For the 2010 World Expo at Shangai, Japanese firms ADK and Murayama and Las-Vegas firm Fisher Technical Services, Inc. created an array of 1,008 15cm diameter actuated spheres, each suspended by its own micro winch. The show does not include data visualizations. Kinetic sculptures made of arrays of suspended spheres abound. An early one is Joe Gilbertson's (2007). More recent ones include Kinetic Rain (2012) and Triptych (2014). Also check BMW's Kinetic Sculpture (2008) on this list. Source: taittowers.com.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Enabling technology Tags: large-scale, self-actuated, shape display

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.

Added by: Pierre Dragicevic. Category: Active physical visualization Tags: design, financial data, personal information management, pragmatic, self-actuated

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 […]

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 Notifying Renewable Energy Availability in Peripheral Locations.

Added by: Maxime Daniel. Category: Active physical visualization Tags: renewable energy, self-actuated, shape-changing interfaces