Interactive Graphics in R [Was: Google Summer of Code 2009]
Hi Simon, Yes I agree with you on the definition of IG (selection, data query, ...), but I only meant to respond to Oleg's "R lacks functionality that would allow displaying of interactive plots with two distinct functionalities: zooming and panning." I thought that was just a problem to adjust the x and y limits, so I posted the "chewing gum" :-) For Oleg: sorry I forgot to mention that currently getGraphicsEvent() only works for Windows screen display. Regards, Yihui -- Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com> Phone: +86-(0)10-82509086 Fax: +86-(0)10-82509086 Mobile: +86-15810805877 Homepage: http://www.yihui.name School of Statistics, Room 1037, Mingde Main Building, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:38 AM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:
On Feb 19, 2009, at 11:20 , Yihui Xie wrote:
Well, for the first idea, isn't it easy enough to fulfill zooming or panning using getGraphicsEvent() in the grDevices package?
Yes, but that's exactly what interactive graphics are NOT about (you just posted a good "chewing gum" reference from my previous e-mail ;)). You can put together ad-hoc hacks (and many have tried it in R before), but the result will not be general interactive graphics. What people don't realize is that a lot in IG software is about user interface and HCI. Having one-shot tools for very specific tasks doesn't really help to solve the big picture (although it may sort of solve your specific immediate problem). There are many good interactive software applications out there, but just linking them to R is just half of the story. What we need is a more general framework for interactive graphics - this requires more than just a graphics subsystem - you have to depart from the concept of graphics objects and include "statistical objects" in the mix such that the underlying data/statistics etc. can be identified by linking back though the graphics. This is something we still lack in R --- but I hope we will get there sooner or later... Cheers, Simon