[HN Gopher] Show HN: Interactive graphs in Rerun with a Rust por...
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Show HN: Interactive graphs in Rerun with a Rust port of D3-force
Rerun 0.21 comes with a new graph viewer that's written in Rust and
runs in the browser via wasm. It's powered by a new force based
layout engine that is a port of much of d3-force to Rust. (The
release also contains some other cool stuff like undo/redo
implemented on top of a timeseries DB.) We built this with
applications in robotics and spatial computing in mind but would
love to hear feedback from folks that would see this as useful in
other domains as well.
Author : nikonp
Score : 52 points
Date : 2024-12-20 09:42 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rerun.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (rerun.io)
| jgoertler wrote:
| Hi, Jochen from Rerun here (@grtlr on GitHub)! I implemented most
| of the graph view, including Fjadra [0], our Rust port of the
| excellent d3-force [1].
|
| Happy to answer any questions!
|
| [0](https://github.com/grtlr/fjadra)
|
| [1](https://d3js.org/d3-force)
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| Is there a public way to add custom Blueprints
| (https://rerun.io/docs/concepts/blueprint) and Visualizers
| (https://rerun.io/docs/concepts/visualizers-and-overrides)? It
| looks like yes for Blueprints, reading through
| https://rerun.io/examples. I am guessing "not yet" for
| Visualizers? For example, I'd like to be able to render a
| Sankey diagram from a "dataflows" Blueprint through the Viewer
| (https://rerun.io/viewer). I realize that non-spatial is not
| Rerun's focus.
| jgoertler wrote:
| Custom visualizers are also supported--in fact the graph view
| started out as an external visualizer.
|
| Here is a tutorial:
| https://rerun.io/docs/howto/visualization/extend-
| ui#custom-v...
|
| And here is the corresponding code example:
| https://github.com/rerun-
| io/rerun/tree/main/examples/rust/cu...
|
| To write your own graph visualization, you can look into the
| implementation of our graph view: https://github.com/rerun-
| io/rerun/tree/main/crates/viewer/re...
|
| In the future we want to provide more types of layouts,
| dataflow is high up on that list. May I ask what kind of data
| you want to visualize? Since you mentioned Sankeys, in your
| case does the structure of the Sankey change as well, or do
| you only expect the edges to grow/shrink over time?
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| Thank you for your reply. I am thinking about variable
| dataflows through a fixed set of nodes -- so, the latter,
| growing and shrinking edges. The application would be
| visualizing system dynamics. The stages in the Sankey would
| be organized by degree of distance from an "intervention"
| node.
| jgoertler wrote:
| That's very interesting! We're currently working on the
| plumbing to be able to assign attributes to edges as well
| --right now it's only possible to style/configure the
| nodes.
|
| Once we have that though, there is another approach that
| you can take before you go down the path of writing your
| own visualizer/view: you can also log custom positions
| for each node. Since the node positions don't change in
| your case that might get you quite far by statically
| logging the nodes with a Sankey layout computed by your
| application.
| rcarmo wrote:
| This is pretty awesome. I especially liked replaying the graph
| layout. I do wonder what kind of native GUI toolkits whis would
| work with (since I don't really care much for web UIs and browser
| overhead).
| nikonp wrote:
| There is a native version as well:
| https://rerun.io/docs/getting-started/installing-viewer
|
| You can for instance install and open the viewer natively with
| just:
|
| > pip install rerun-sdk
|
| > rerun
| burningion wrote:
| Have been playing with rerun since the early days, and the team
| has built a ton of amazing features for visualizing your robotics
| datasets. I used it on a bicyclist safety system to ingest raw
| data for playback and analysis later.
|
| I especially like that they're also building an (amazing) Rust
| version of imgui called egui, and open sourcing all the work for
| the ecosystem: https://github.com/emilk/egui
| simgt wrote:
| I've been using rerun for a while to visualize the content of
| inference pipelines, it's nothing short of amazing!
|
| I really wanted live views of my gstreamer pipelines, so I've
| started to write a tool with egui [0]. Looks like rerun's
| GraphView doesn't support subgraphs and horizontal layouts yet,
| but I'm sure I'll soon be able to just have a gstreamer tracer
| that pushes reruns logs. That's better than having to find the
| motivation to go through my todo list! Yeah!
|
| [0] https://github.com/simgt/glitch
| jgoertler wrote:
| Thank you for linking your project--that looks really cool! I
| saw you also implemented a pan-and-zoom area. We are currently
| working on moving Rerun's implementation to egui [0], so maybe
| keep an eye on that.
|
| It would be super cool to have layered graph drawing in
| (Sugiyama-style) in Rerun too. The tricky-but super
| interesting-challenge that we face is that our layout
| implementations need to be consistent across timestamps if the
| underlying structure of the graph changes, which is why we
| initially chose a force-based layout approach. There, the time-
| varying aspect is handled naturally by the simulation.
|
| The very interactive nature of Rerun also poses more
| restrictions on the implementation of our algorithms: re-
| layouts ideally need to be fast, to produce visualizations
| quickly, especially when scrubbing the timeline.
|
| I still hope we can rid you of some of the todos ;).
|
| [0](https://github.com/emilk/egui/pull/5505)
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(page generated 2024-12-20 23:01 UTC)