Creating an Interactive Scatterplot Cloud with TERR and threejs

If you want to create an interactive scatterplot, you can use the scatterplot3js function from the threejs package.

About this task

You can use RStudio to create this 100,000-point interactive scatter plot, or you can use the TERR console and display the results in a browser.

About this task

Note: You can find samples for the threejs package used in this example on the internet. For more information, see http://www.htmlwidgets.org/showcase_threejs.html.

Before you begin

TERR, access to the internet, and a browser.

Procedure

From the TERR console or RStudio prompt, install the threejs package.
```
install.packages("threejs")
```
TERR checks TRAN and then CRAN for the packages to install, and then installs them along with any packages they require.
Call the library function to load the required packages.
```
library("threejs")
```
Assign the value 10000 to N1, and the value 90000 to the name N2.
```
N1 <- 10000
N2 <- 90000
```
Assign the point distribution to the x axis.

Set a random normal distribution for both N1 and N2, with the standard deviation for N1 of .05, and the standard deviation for N2 of 2.
```
x <- c(rnorm(N1, sd=0.5), rnorm(N2, sd=2))
```
Assign the point distribution to the y axis.

Set a random normal distribution for both N1 and N2, with the standard deviation for N1 set to .05, and the standard deviation for N2 set to 2.
```
y <- c(rnorm(N1, sd=0.5), rnorm(N2, sd=2))
```
Assign the point distribution to the z axis.

Set a random normal distribution for N1, with the standard deviation of .05, and a random Poisson distribution for N2 with lambda of 20 to specify the means. Subtract 20 from the concatenation to center the points correctly on the z axis.
```
z  <- c(rnorm(N1, sd=0.5), rpois(N2, lambda=20)-20)
```
Assign to col the color values for N1 and N2.

Set N1 points to be yellow (#ffff00) and set the N2 points to be blue (#0000ff).
```
col <- c(rep("#ffff00",N1),rep("#0000ff",N2))
```
Call the threejs function scatterplot3js to create the three-dimensional plot.

Plot the points for the coordinate values x, y, and z axes in the three-dimensional graph, setting the colors to col, and the point size to 0.25.
```
scatterplot3js(x,y,z, color=col, size=0.25)
```

Results

A browser opens and shows the three-dimensional scatterplot, which you can reposition to see the point distribution.

Tip: Dragging the visualization vertically reveals the N1 points centered in the cloud of N2 points.

three dimensional interactive scatterplot