rgl (version 0.97.0)

rglwidget: An htmlwidget to hold an rgl scene.

Description

The htmlwidgets package provides a framework for embedding graphical displays in HTML documents of various types. This function provides the necessities to embed an rgl scene in one.

Usage

rglwidget(x = scene3d(), width = NULL, height = NULL, controllers = NULL, snapshot = FALSE, elementId = NULL, reuse = !interactive(), webGLoptions = list(preserveDrawingBuffer = TRUE), ...)

Arguments

x

An rgl scene produced by the scene3d function.

width, height

The width and height of the display in pixels.

controllers

Names of playwidget objects associated with this scene, or objects (typically piped in). See Details below.

snapshot

Control of snapshot of scene. See writeWebGL for details.

elementId

The id to use on the HTML div component that will hold the scene.

reuse

A logical variable indicating whether rgl objects from earlier scenes should be referenced. See the Details below.

webGLoptions

A list of options to pass to WebGL when the drawing context is created. See the Details below.

...

Additional arguments to pass to htmlwidgets::createWidget.

Value

An object of class "htmlwidget" (or "shiny.tag.list" if pipes are used) that will intelligently print itself into HTML in a variety of contexts including the R console, within R Markdown documents, and within Shiny output bindings.If reuse = TRUE, a record will be kept of objects in the scene and they need not be included in the HTML generated for later scenes. This is normally useful only in rmarkdown documents which can have many rgl scenes; if the widget is displayed in RStudio, only one scene will be shown.

Appearance

The appearance of the display is set by the stylesheet in system.file("htmlwidgets/lib/rglClass/rgl.css"). The widget is of class rglWebGL, with id set according to elementId. (As of this writing, no special settings are given for class rglWebGL, but you can add your own.)

Details

This produces a WebGL version of an rgl scene using the htmlwidgets framework. This allows display of the scene in the RStudio IDE, a browser, an rmarkdown document or in a shiny app.

options(rgl.printRglwidget = TRUE) will cause rglwidget() to be called and displayed when the result of an rgl call that changes the scene is printed.

In a shiny app, there will often be one or more playwidget objects in the app, taking input from the user. In order to be sure that the initial value of the user control is reflected in the scene, you should list all players in the controllers argument. See the sample application in system.file("shinyDemo", package = "rglwidget") for an example.

In RMarkdown or in standalone code, you can use a magrittr-style “pipe” command to join an rglwidget with a playwidget. If the playwidget comes first, it should be piped into the controllers argument. If the rglwidget comes first, it can be piped into the first argument of playwidget.

If the reuse argument is FALSE (the default in interactive use), earlier information will be cleared before drawing the new scene. If TRUE, earlier data will be re-used in the current scene, so it may be smaller and faster to load. In both cases information from the current scene (added to earlier information if reuse=TRUE) will be saved for possible use in a future scene. If reuse=NA, the saved information will neither be used nor updated.

If elementId is NULL and we are not in a Shiny app, elementId is set to a random value to facilitate re-use of information.

To save the display to a file, use htmlwidgets::saveWidget. This requires pandoc to be installed.

The webGLoptions argument is a list which will be passed when the WebGL context is created. See the WebGL 1.0 specification on https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/specs for possible settings. The default in rglwidget differs from the WebGL default by setting preserveDrawingBuffer = TRUE in order to allow other tools to read the image, but please note that some implementations of WebGL contain bugs with this setting. We have attempted to work around them, but may change our default in the future if this proves unsatisfactory.

See Also

hook_webgl for an earlier approach to this problem. rglwidgetOutput for Shiny details.

Examples

save <- getOption("rgl.useNULL")
options(rgl.useNULL=TRUE)
example("plot3d", "rgl")
widget <- rglwidget()
if (interactive())
  widget
  

# Save it to a file.  This requires pandoc
filename <- tempfile(fileext = ".html")
htmlwidgets::saveWidget(rglwidget(), filename)
browseURL(filename)