K3D-jupyter is a notebook visualization package which we have been developing since 2015. It offers a powerful and efficient tool with a simple interface to appealing techniques like volumetric rendering, meshes, lines, and points. Its performance allows for smooth visualization of datasets like 100 million points and updates with their position from python interface.
The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that enables the creation and sharing of executable documents containing live code, equations, visualisations and explanatory text. In particular, Jupyter is used actively for interactive and exploratory computations, often involving visualisation of data. Two-dimensional visualisation in Jupyter is an area with popular and well-established tools, but there have been fewer mature solutions for interactive three-dimensional visualisation. K3D-jupyter is a package which provides a fast and simple 3d plotting tool in the Jupyter notebook. The primary aim of K3D-jupyter is to be easy for use as stand alone package like matplotlib, but also to allow interoperation with existing libraries as VTK. The power of ipywidgets makes it also a fast and performant visualisation tool for HPC computing e.g. fluid dynamics.
This software is part of OpenDreamKit project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 676541.