Taking the Scenic Route: Interactive and Performant Tour Animations

Abstract

The tour provides a useful vehicle for exploring high dimensional datasets. It works by combining a sequence of projections---the tour path---in to an animation---the display method. Current display implementations in R are limited in their interactivity and portability, and give poor performance and jerky animations even for small datasets. We take a detour into web technologies, such as Three.js and WebGL, to support smooth and performant tour visualisations. The R package detourr implements a set of display tools that allow for rich interactions (including orbit controls, scrubbing, and brushing) and smooth animations for large datasets. It provides a declarative R interface which is accessible to new users, and it supports linked views using crosstalk and shiny. The resulting animations are portable across a wide range of browsers and devices. We also extend the radial transformation of the Sage Tour (@laa2021burning) to 3 or more dimensions with an implementation in 3D, and provide a simplified implementation of the Slice Tour (@laa2020slice).