Adding 3D plot support to Livebook

[bmitc]

I am a big fan of notebooks, especially using them to learn, and I really love Livebook! I am wanting to work through the book Programming Machine Learning by Paolo Perrotta, but it contains 3D plots. While of course, I could continue working through the book, leaving off the 3D plots, it would be great if Livebook had that capability in general. From what I can tell Vega-Lite and Vega do not support 3D plots.

I would love to help work on Livebook by adding 3D plot functionality!

Are there any thoughts on:

1. Which 3D plot library should be used? The main one I know of is Plotly. This is what I have used with F# and .NET Interactive notebooks.
2. What are the requirements for rendering within a Livebook notebook? I assume that there needs to be some Kino smart cell integration like that found in :kino_vega_lite, for example :kino_plotly.

If anyone has any ideas or thoughts on how to get started on this, I think this could be a nice project.

[josevalim]

Livebook doesn’t really know about VegaLite, which means you can add Plotly support as well and you can use the kino_vega_lite package as the foundation.

The explore section of your Livebook also has a series of tutorials showing how to get started with custom Kinos.

Have fun!

[josevalim]

Oh, you can also look at this discussion: vega/vega#1738

There is already a library called vega-deckgl that adds 3D rendering to Vega. So the question is if it is possible to leverage that from VegaLite too. If it is, then we can support it on the existing lib most likely.

[bmitc]

Apologies for the late reply to this! I got distracted with some other things. Thank you for the pointers here!

The Vega 3D experiments seem interesting but don't seem to have much momentum behind them, but I'll keep an eye out there. I'll do some browsing to see if there's something more up to date.

I dove into Kino a bit last month, but I'd like to get back to it and start experimenting with possibly adding a Plotly implementation on top of it.