This dataset is supplementary to the article of Ritter et al. (2017). In this article, a new experimental device is presented that facilitates precise measurements of boundary forces and surface deformation at high temporal and spatial resolution. This supplementary dataset contains the measurement data from two experiments carried out in this new experimental device: one experiment of an accretionary critical wedge and one of Riedel-type strike-slip deformation. For a detailed description of the set-up and an analysis of the data, please see Ritter et al. (2017). The data available for either experiment are:• A video showing deformation in top view together with the evolution of boundary force. This file is in AVI-format.• A time-series of 2D vector fields describing the surface deformation. These vector fields were obtained from top-view video images of the respective experiment by means of digital image correlation (DIC). Each vector field is contained in a separate file; the files are consecutively numbered. The vector fields are stored in .mat-files that can be opened using e.g. the software Matlab or the freely available GNU Octave. They take the form of Matlab structure arrays and are compatible to the PIVmat-toolbox by Moisy (2016) that is freely available. The most important fields of the structure are: x and y, that are vectors spanning a coordinate system, and vx and vy, which are arrays containing the actual vector components in x- and y-direction, respectively.• A file containing the measurements of the boundary force applied to drive deformation. This file is also a .mat-file, containing a structure F with fields force, velocity and position. These fields are vectors describing the force applied by the indenter, the indenter velocity and the indenter position