Software Tools for Creating Physical Visualizations



Summary of the Internship Topic

Physical visualizations so far mostly come in the form of data sculptures whose purposes are essentially artistic, communicative or educational. As opposed to 3D visualizations presented on computer screens, physical 3D visualizations are easy to handle and analyze. This property makes them a suitable alternative to visualize data sets that can benefit from a 3D visualization.

Recent rapid fabrication technology facilitates the creation of data-accurate physical visualizations. Currently, the process of giving a physical shape to a data set is rather cumbersome and requires the manual or semi-automatic creation of a 3D model for each data set.

This project will investigate

  • requirements and limitations of the automatic creation of physical visualizations
  • methods to automatically create 3D computer models from given data sets that can be made physical, and hence obey the laws of physics, e.g., no free floating parts. As this is a iterative prototyping process the tool needs to be customizable. example for a laser cuttable stencil for a 3D bar chart.

The student will have access to the lab's fab lab which is under construction and already includes a laser cutter (located in our lab) and a 3D printer (located at Telecom ParisTech). Prior experience in digital fabrication is not strictly required, although helpful.

Requirements

  • (mandatory) programming skills at least in Java
  • (recommended) experience in 3D modeling or programming
  • (optional) experience in digital fabrication

Advising

The intern is advised by Yvonne Jansen and Pierre Dragicevic.

Links