[R] [Rd] Display an Image on a Plane

[Barry Rowlingson]

[more an R-help than R-dev thing]

Ben Bolker wrote:
> Labbe, Vincent (AEREX <Vincent.Labbe.AEREX <at> drdc-rddc.gc.ca> writes:

>>I am new to R and I would like to display an image on a plane in a 3D plot,
>>i.e. I would like to be able to specify a theta and a phi parameters like in
>>the function persp to display a 2D image on an inclined plane.

>    can't think of an easy way to do this: what do you mean by "image"
> exactly?  A bitmapped image from a file?  Or something like the
> output of image()?  If the latter, you may be able to cobble together something
> using the trans3d() function (i.e., manually recreating an image()
> by drawing colored squares, but transforming each of the to the 3D
> perspective).  If the former, you might be able to do something with
> the pixmap package ...
> 

  I think once you get into doing fancy visualisations like this then 
you may find a solution outside of R. The front runners are probably:

http://www.opendx.org/

http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/

http://www.llnl.gov/visit/

  Not sure of the R-integration possibilities here, but you'd probably 
have to export your data to a file and pick it up in the visualisation 
package. You'd also have to build your complete plot from scratch in the 
package if its really just an R persp() you want to add to. Most of 
these packages can do persp()-style plots without even *ahem* persp-iring.

  Some of these packages are scriptable from Python or Tcl, which could 
make for tighter integration with R. A full R 3d graphics device would 
be nice... Rgl could be there already! - 
http://rgl.neoscientists.org/Gallery.html

Barry