Perspective

Authors

[Editor] Hu Zheng;

[Contributors]

Modified

2026-01-17

Note

Hiplot website

This page is the tutorial for source code version of the Hiplot Perspective plugin. You can also use the Hiplot website to achieve no code ploting. For more information please see the following link:

https://hiplot.cn/basic/perspective?lang=en

The three-dimensional perspective is a three-dimensional figure that can connect the higher values contained in a matrix with surfaces.

Setup

System Requirements: Cross-platform (Linux/MacOS/Windows)
Programming language: R
Dependent packages: data.table; jsonlite; shape; ggplotify

# Install packages
if (!requireNamespace("data.table", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("data.table")
}
if (!requireNamespace("jsonlite", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("jsonlite")
}
if (!requireNamespace("shape", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("shape")
}
if (!requireNamespace("ggplotify", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggplotify")
}

# Load packages
library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
library(shape)
library(ggplotify)

sessioninfo::session_info("attached")

─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31)
 os       Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS
 system   x86_64, linux-gnu
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  C.UTF-8
 ctype    C.UTF-8
 tz       UTC
 date     2026-01-17
 pandoc   3.1.3 @ /usr/bin/ (via rmarkdown)
 quarto   1.8.27 @ /usr/local/bin/quarto

─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package    * version date (UTC) lib source
 data.table * 1.18.0  2025-12-24 [1] RSPM
 ggplotify  * 0.1.3   2025-09-20 [1] RSPM
 jsonlite   * 2.0.0   2025-03-27 [1] RSPM
 shape      * 1.4.6.1 2024-02-23 [1] RSPM

 [1] /home/runner/work/_temp/Library
 [2] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/site-library
 [3] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/library
 * ── Packages attached to the search path.

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Data Preparation

The loaded data is a matrix.

# Load data
data <- data.table::fread(jsonlite::read_json("https://hiplot.cn/ui/basic/perspective/data.json")$exampleData$textarea[[1]])
data <- as.data.frame(data)

# Convert data structure
data <- as.matrix(data)
col <- drapecol(data)

# View data
head(data[,1:5])

      V1  V2  V3  V4  V5
[1,] 100 101 102 103 104
[2,] 100 101 102 103 104
[3,] 101 102 103 104 105
[4,] 101 102 103 104 105
[5,] 101 102 103 104 105
[6,] 101 102 103 104 105

Visualization

# Perspective
p <- as.ggplot(function() {
  persp(as.matrix(data),
    theta = 45, phi = 20,
    expand = 0.5,
    r = 180, col = col,
    ltheta = 120,
    shade = 0.5,
    ticktype = "detailed",
    xlab = "X", ylab = "Y", zlab = "Z",
    border = "black" # could be NA
  )
  title("Perspective Plot", line = 0)
})

p

A clear view of a mountain peak.