Physical representations of data offer physical and spatial ways of looking at, navigating, and interacting with data. While digital fabrication has facilitated the creation of objects with ...data‐driven geometry, rendering data as a physically fabricated object is still a daunting leap for many physicalization designers. Rendering in the scope of this research refers to the back‐and‐forth process from digital design to digital fabrication and its specific challenges. We developed a corpus of example data physicalizations from research literature and physicalization practice. This survey then unpacks the “rendering” phase of the extended InfoVis pipeline in greater detail through these examples, with the aim of identifying ways that researchers, artists, and industry practitioners “render” physicalizations using digital design and fabrication tools.
Landscape models of geospatial regions provide an intuitive mechanism for exploring complex geospatial information. However, the methods currently used to create these scale models require a large ...amount of resources, which restricts the availability of these models to a limited number of popular public places, such as museums and airports. In this paper, we have proposed a system for creating these physical models using an affordable 3D printer in order to make the creation of these models more widely accessible. Our system retrieves GIS relevant to creating a physical model of a geospatial region and then addresses the two major limitations of affordable 3D printers, namely the limited number of materials and available printing volume. This is accomplished by separating features into distinct extruded layers and splitting large models into smaller pieces, allowing us to employ different methods for the visualization of different geospatial features, like vegetation and residential areas, in a 3D printing context. We confirm the functionality of our system by printing two large physical models of relatively complex landscape regions.
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