The study of realization spaces of convex polytopes is one of the oldest subjects in Polytope Theory. Most likely, it goes back to Legendre (1794).  A lot of progress took place since that time. However, many questions remained open. In general, computing the dimension of the realization space $\mathcal{R}(P)$ of a d-polytope $P$ is hard, even for $d = 4$, as shown by Mnëv (1988) and Richter-Gebert (1996).
In this presentation, we will discuss two criteria to determine the dimension of the realization space, and use them to show that $\dim \mathcal{R}(P) = f_1(P) + 6$ for a 3-polytope $P$, and $\dim \mathcal{R}(P) = df_{d-1}(P)$ (resp. $\dim \mathcal{R}(P) = df_0(P)$ ) for a simple (resp. simplicial) $d$-polytope $P$. We will also discuss the realization spaces of some interesting 2-simple 2-simplicial 4-polytopes. Namely, we will consider the realization space of the 24-cell and of a 2s2s polytope with 12 vertices which was found by Miyata (2011), and give a better bound for/determine its dimension.