Scatter 3D notebook widget
For the longest time I have needed a program to plot scatter plots in 3D with the ability of selecting points using a lasso tool. For instance, I needed to select some individuals in a plot showing genetic distances in order to know its geographical origin.
During a long time we used CurlyWhirly, but that software is not maintained anymore, then we moved to glue, but I always found that software a little too cumbersome for my taste. Many times I've looked for alternatives, but I found none.
Alas, I was resigned, but last december I heard about anywidget in the Talk Python Podcast, a library created to ease the development of marimo and jupyter notebook widgets. I have never programmed anything serious in Javascript, but I thought that maybe with the help of an AI tool and anywidget I could try to build a 3D scatterplot notebook widget to my liking, and I did it!
You can download the widget from its GitHub repository or from PyPI. We have already used it in our research on the history of the tomato.


