Creating Physical Visualizations With MakerVis

Saiganesh Swaminathan, Conglei Shi, Yvonne Jansen, Pierre Dragicevic, Lora Oehlberg and Jean-Daniel Fekete

Abstract

An increasing variety of physical visualizations are being built, for purposes ranging from art and entertainment to business analytics and scientific research. The creation of physical visualizations is however a laborious process and demands expertise in both data visualization and (digital) fabrication. We illustrate one of the currently many possible ways of creating a physical visualization through a case-study. We then present our prototype system, MakerVis. It is the first tool that integrates the entire workflow, from data selection to digital fabrication using additive or subtractive techniques. We demonstrate the usage of MakerVis through a complete scenario of how an end-user would construct a physical visualization.

Materials

Citation