Three.js and R

Three.js widgets for R and shiny. The package includes

• graphjs: an interactive force directed graph widget
• scatterplot3js: a 3-d scatterplot widget similar to the scatterplot3d function
• globejs: a widget that plots data and images on a 3-d globe

The widgets are easy to use and render directly in RStudio, in R markdown, in Shiny applications, and from command-line R via a web browser. They produce high-quality interactive visualizations with just a few lines of R code.

Visualizations optionally use accelerated WebGL graphics, falling back to non-accelerated graphics for systems without WebGL. When WebGL is available, the scatterplot3js function can produce fluid, interactive pointclouds with hundreds of thousands of points.

See http://threejs.org for details on three.js.

See http://bwlewis.github.io/rthreejs for an example.

This project is based on the new htmlwidgets package. See https://github.com/ramnathv/htmlwidgets for details and links to amazingly cool visualization widgets for R.

What's new

Create force directed graphs the graphjs function.

The scatterplot3js function now supports scatterplot3d-like xlim, ylim and zlim options.

The globejs function can draw arcs and bars.

We include mouse-over labels for labeling scatterplot3js points, thanks to contributions from Alexey Stukalov, https://github.com/alyst, thanks Alexey!

NOTE!

These examples generally run best in WebGL-enabled viewers, including at least Chrome, and recent versions of Internet Explorer web browsers. Users have had some issues with Firefox on Windows. Safari on Mac OS X seems to fall back to Canvas (not WebGL) rendering, but works. We try to maintain basic support for non-WebGL equipped browsers, but the performance and rendering quality will generally be inferior to WebGL visualizations.

The examples run inside RStudio, acting similarly to normal R plots. RStudio renders them using Canvas right now, but an upcoming version of RStudio will support WebGL.

Install

Use the devtools package to install threejs directly from GitHub on any R platform (Mac, Windows, Linux, ...). You'll need the 'devtools' package.

if(!require("devtools")) install.packages("devtools",repos="http://cran.rstudio.com/")
devtools::install_github("bwlewis/rthreejs")

Examples

The following example illustrates the 3D scatterplot widget.

library("shiny")
runApp(system.file("examples/scatterplot",package="threejs"))

The next example illustrates the globe widget by plotting the relative population of some cities using data from the R maps package on a globe. It's based on the JavaScript WebGL Globe Toolkit (https://github.com/dataarts) by the Google Creative Lab Data Arts Team.

runApp(system.file("examples/globe",package="threejs"))

For detailed help on the widgets and additional examples, see

?scatterplot3js
?globejs

Changes to the three.min.js JavaScript library

The package now includes a check for a manual (but simple) change required of the three.min.js JavaScript library, discovered by Joe Cheng at RStudio. For details see bwlewis#15.

The required change is near the very beginning of the three.min.js file. Whenever we update this library we need to change:

// threejs.org/license
'use strict';var THREE={REVISION:

to

// threejs.org/license
'use strict';var THREE=window.THREE={REVISION:

That enables the library to work correctly with the shiny renderUI functions.

Status

[](https://codecov.io/github/bwlewis/rthreejs?branch=master) [](http://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/threejs/index.html)