Use Perl To Call R To Create Interactive 3D Plot

Question

[qiyunzhu]

Hello all,

I'm stuck with a specific question concerning the communication between Perl and R, via Perl module Statistics::R. I want to create an interactive 3D scatter plot using R module rgl. When I manually did it in R console, it worked perfectly. I could mouse-rotate the graph in a window. However, when I tried to automate the process with Perl, the graph was displayed, but was dead. I couldn't rotate. My system is Ubuntu 12.04. Perl and R are up-to-date. I don't know where the problem is, but just guess it's a window rendering problem.

What I did in Perl is (simply):

$R->send("library('rgl')");
$R->send("plot3d(x, y, z, xlab='x', ylab='y', zlab='z', title='3D scatter plot')");

Can anyone point out what is wrong? Thanks!

[Neilfws]

Relevance of this question to a bioinformatics research problem please?

[Flow]

better ask this is stack overflow

Answer 1

[Malachi Griffith]

I suspect this may not possible in the way that you hope... Although I also hope I am wrong because I can think of some potential use cases for this behavior.

This question is probably of interest to many here who routinely visualize biological data in R, but I agree with Neilfws that it is perhaps more suited to stackoverflow.

These questions from stackoverflow sound relevant:

Switch R script from non-interactive to interactive

Running Statistics::R module in Perl on Mac OS - no image being produced

As do these threads from the R mailing list

[R] R script to start session (without automatically finishing)

[R] Non-interactive sessions

From this thread: "You need to explicitly start an x11 driver if you are not running interactively, ie using the x11() function."

[qiyunzhu]

Thank you very much for these links! They are very informative and helpful!