Interacting with points in a three-dimensional space

When visualizing points in 3D space, it is often very useful to rotate, zoom, and pan the representation interactively. This recipe demonstrates how to plot data in 3D and interact with it in real time.

Getting ready

The library used in this recipe uses gnuplot to render the graph. We should first install gnuplot.

On Debian-based systems such as Ubuntu, we can install it using apt-get as follows:

$ sudo apt-get install gnuplot-x11

The official place to download gnuplot is from its main website available at http://www.gnuplot.info.

After gnuplot is set up, install the easyplot Haskell library using Cabal as follows:

$ cabal install easyplot

Also, install a helper CSV package as follows:

$ cabal install csv

Also, create two comma-separated files, input1.csv and input2.csv, which represent two separate sets of points as follows:

$ cat input1.csv
1,1,1
1,2,1
0,1,1
1,1,0
2,1,0
2,1,1
1,0,1

$ cat input2.csv
4,3,2
3,3,2
3,2,3
4,4,3
5,4,2
4,2,3
3,4,3...