Building R’s RGL library for OSX Snow Leopard

RGL is needed for nice interactive 3d plots in R, but a pain to find out how to build on a modern OSX machine.

“The rgl package is a visualization device system for R, using OpenGL as the rendering backend. An rgl device at its core is a real-time 3D engine written in C++. It provides an interactive viewpoint navigation facility (mouse + wheel support) and an R programming interface.”

The following commands worked for me in OSX Snow Leopard:

• svn checkout svn://svn.r-forge.r-project.org/svnroot/rgl
• R CMD INSTALL ./rgl/pkg/rgl –configure-args=”–disable-carbon” rgl

Here’s a test that should give an interactive 3D display if all went well, using a built-in dataset:

library(rgl)
cars.data <- as.matrix(sweep(mtcars[, -1], 2, colMeans(mtcars[, -1]))) # cargo cult'd
xx <- svd(cars.data %*% t(cars.data))
xxd <- xx$v %*% sqrt(diag(xx$d))
x1 <- xxd[, 1]
y1 <- xxd[, 2]
z1 <- xxd[, 3]
plot3d(x1,y1,z1,col="green", size=4)
text3d(x1,y1,z1, row.names(mtcars))