[Rd] Interactive Graphics in R [Was: Google Summer of Code 2009]

[Yihui Xie]

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
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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
>