Plot 1 billion of points in 3D on the browser

Question

I have grid of approximately 200 x 200 x 200 x 150 that I need to plot on the browser.

This can be represented as X x Y x Z x Color. A 3D scatter has usually functionality for that.

I have tried the plotly.Scatter3d that works wonders for much smaller datasets.

I had a look at Datashader but unfortunately only works for 2D. I also checked Datashader + Holoviews but haven't found any solution...

The closer that I get was this MRI Slice example from PlotLy: https://plot.ly/python/visualizing-mri-volume-slices/

If there's a possibility to add additional slicers (X, Y and Z) this might be a solution. Not what I wanted, but a solution.

Any ideas how to achiece this would be much appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

You may be able to use tools from http://vaex.astro.rug.nl , as it has 3D versions of Datashader's aggregations, though it focuses on density plots (heatmaps) rather than already gridded data.

Several people have set up tools to work with image stacks (or with volume data treated as image stacks) in Datashader+HoloViews, with some sample code at https://github.com/pangeo-data/pangeo/issues/144. I think there is a runnable example somewhere at http://pangeo.pydata.org called "scikit-image-example.ipynb", though that may no longer be up. We would definitely like to make it easier to do this, as it's a common problem, though it's not currently on our immediate roadmap. Happy to accept contributions if people do make something reusable...