The world is flat and rectangular when it comes to the types of physical screens that we use for representing data and making decisions. Display technology, however, is already evolving quickly: curved, bendable, and highly flexible displays, spherical displays, cubed displays, and even drone-based displays have emerged and are commercially available. These novel types of displays offer new ways to represent and explore data embedded in everyday environments, to communicate it, and share it. For a possible future in which non-planar displays will be ubiquitous, however, there are open questions about what visualizations should look like on these displays, how we would interact with them, and how people would engage with them. Non-planar displays, therefore, not only pose perceptual challenges for data visualization, but it is also yet largely unexplored which visualization types work on them and how to create effective and appealing interactive data visualization experiences. As such, the potential and the challenges of these displays for visual data representation remain unexplored. This project aims to escape from the “display flatland” that characterizes today’s research in visualization. It will establish foundations for how to engage with a future in which physical displays take on several different form factors and become truly embedded in our environments. We will pursue this larger goal through fundamental research that targets how we understand, think about, design, and evaluate visualizations for non-planar displays. A holistic research approach with six main components defines our work:

  1. Establishment of a design space: The design space will impose a theoretical and systematic structure on the set of technological possibilities of non-planar displays and is expected to have generative, evaluative, and descriptive power.
  2. Technology prototyping: We will create research platforms as testbeds for visualization design and subsequent empirical analyses and first deployment.
  3. Empirical studies: We will lay the foundation for technological and visualization development.
  4. Visualization design: We will explore how non-planar displays can change the way we fundamentally represent and interact with data.
  5. Application building: We will create success stories of non-planar display visualization that allow us to demonstrate our grander vision to make data visualizations truly ubiquitous.
  6. Community building: We will encourage work on non-planar display visualization to continue beyond the scope of this project, for example by organizing workshops and publishing a research agenda to showcase avenues for future work.

Through this approach, we will provide the visualization community and practitioners alike with know-how and tools to expand research and application beyond planar displays. We contribute to extending the way how and where people can experience data.