WebVR for R

Installing

I'm not on CRAN yet (there are some licensing things I'll have to finangle to do so)

Do this instead:

# install.packages('devtools') # if you haven't already
devtools::install_github('scottmmjackson/webvrr')

Using

Functionality is a little thin at the moment. Here's what you can do:

library(webvrr)

## Wireframe scene
webvrr()

## Custom scene
webvrr(sphere = 'https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Equirectangular_projection_SW.jpg')

## Custom scene as base64
library(base64enc)
library(ggplot2)
data("diamonds")
f <- tempfile()
png(f, width = 5000, height = 2500) # 2:1 is a good ratio for sphere views.
ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = carat, y = price)) + geom_point()
dev.off()
data <- base64encode(f)
sphere <- paste0("data:image/png;base64,", data)
webvrr(sphere = sphere)

The last custom scene can be seen here

The starting scene right now is just a wireframe sphere:

A fun thing to do is go onto flickr and search for "equirectangular". Be sure to credit people who release their work under CC Attribution!

Roadmap

My vision isn't really to implement all of the WebGL API in htmlwidgets. That could be a cool project, and if someone would like to undertake that, I would be more than happy to rewrite the API for this project using that.

Instead my vision is really more of providing a few simple starting scenes and allowing people to build up data displays and interactivity. This is really meant to be a "data-science-oriented" package and not a general-purpose solution for like, writing a video game in R.

• Support for different starting scenes
  • Sphere
  • Stadium (cylinder w/ floor & ceiling)
  • Infinite plane (sphere w/ floor)
• Hooks for adding/removing scene elements
  • Hook for changing base scene
  • Hook for creating textured primitives
  • Hook for deleting elements
  • Hook for modifying elements
  • Hook for creating positional sound (?)
• Interactive/Shinyfied elements
  • Hover event for elements
    • e.g.: I look at a country in my globe view, it triggers some shiny action that queries a data set and draws an info panel or something
  • Click/Gamepad Press for elements