Tyler Morgan-Wall

One of the hardest details to get right in 3D data visualization is lighting: since 2D screens don’t offer the benefit of stereoscopic vision, we have to rely on subtle cues like occlusion, relative motion (if animated), and shading to be able to interpret

Positron is a new IDE by the creators of RStudio that’s built on VSCode’s open source core, but layered with extra bells and whistles for R (and Python, if that’s your thing).

Intro It all started with a tweet that caught my eye - a slick 3D rendering of beveled polygons by Yi Shen @pissang1.

We like the moon The moon is very useful, everyone Everybody like the moon Because it light up the sky at night and it lovely and it makes the tides go and we like it But not as much as cheese We really like cheese — The Spongmonkies, 2002 Introduction Ti…

Roadtripping America in R What’s cooler than spinning 3D animations of geospatial data?

Saturn!

Dataviz Nanopost: 360° VR Videos in R When you create a traditional 3D visualization, one problem you inevitably have to tackle is “Where do I point the camera?”

Dataviz Nanopost: 3D Slices of the Earth This is the first in a series of tiny posts where I show a data visualization along with the code used to generate it.

DataCoaster Tycoon: Building 3D Rollercoaster Tours of Your Data in R with rayrender 3D data visualization presents unique challenges for the data viz practitioner.

osm This post is a tutorial on how to add Open Street Map data to maps made with rayshader in R.

This post will serve as a guide on making the above visualization entirely in R (using rayrender), directly from the data source!

A Galton board (aka a “Bean Machine”) is an interesting mix of chaos and predictability: a single ball’s path is unpredictable, yet the behavior of a mass of balls results in a remarkably consistent result.

Tl;dr: I will show you how to query the OpenSky REST API directly from R, load and clean the data, and then finally visualize it in 3D using the rayrender package—entirely in R.

One fun aspect of building a 3D renderer in R (and more generally, building anything in a programming language with a REPL) is the lack of friction between your code your results: rather than constructing a 3D scene by hand using a GUI, you can generate y…

Ever since I released rayshader to the public, there’s been one question that comes up time and time again: “How do I use rayshader to overlay satellite imagery onto a 3D surface?”

I’ve been having fun the last few months adhering to a relatively rapid open-source development schedule (as much as you can call a one-man project driven by a Mac Stickies window a “schedule”) with constant releases of rayrender, rayshader, and now rayim…

Note: This post is also marks the release of rayrender 0.3.0: to see what new features are included (and there are many), head to the bottom of the post.

As rayshader gracefully rotates into its second year, I’m happy to announce the release of a feature I’ve been teasing for a while: 3D ggplots!

In mid-February, I found myself staring at the computer screen with a weekend free and a choice to make.

What a year.