Question

I am new to GLUT and opengl. I need to draw a scatterplot matrix for n dimensional array.
I have saved the data from csv to a vector of vectors and each vector corresponds to a row. I have plotted just one scatterplot. And used GL_LINES to draw the grid. My questions
1. How do I draw points in a particular grid? Using GL_POINTS I can only draw points in the entire window.

Please let me know need any further info to answer this question

Thanks

Answer 1

What you need to do is be able to transform your data’s (x,y) coordinates into screen coordinates. The most straightforward way to do it actually does not rely on OpenGL or GLUT. All you have to do is use a little math. Determine the screen (x,y) coordinates of the place where you want a datapoint for (0,0) to be on the screen, and then determine how far apart you want one increment to be on the screen. Simply take your original data points, apply the offset, and then scale them, to get your screen coordinates, which you then pass into glVertex2f() (or whatever function you are using to specify points in your API).

For instance, you might decide you want point (0,0) in your data to be at location (200,0) on your screen, and the distance between 0 and 1 in your data to be 30 pixels on the screen. This operation will look like this:

int x = 0, y = 0;  //Original data points
int scaleX = 30, scaleY = 30;  //Scaling values for each component
int offsetX = 100, offsetY = 100;  //Where you want the origin of your graph to be

// Apply the scaling values and offsets:
int screenX = x * scaleX + offsetX;
int screenY = y * scaleY + offsetY;

// Calls to your drawing functions using screenX and screenY as your coordinates

You will have to determine values that make sense for the scalaing and offsets. You can also have your program use different values for different sets of data, so you can display multiple graphs on the same screen. But this is a simple way to do it.

There are also other ways you can go about this. OpenGL has very powerful coordinate transformation functions and matrix math capabilities. Those may become more useful when you develop increasingly elaborate programs. They’re most useful if you’re going to be moving things around the screen in real-time, or operating on incredibly large data sets, as they allow you to perform these mathematical calculations very quickly using your graphics hardware (which is able to do them much faster than the CPU). However, the time it takes for the CPU to do simple calculations like those where you only are going to do them once or very infrequently on limited sets of data is not a problem for computers today.