Open nvaytet opened 3 months ago
For the record, a discussion on Slack about the usefulness of being able to display additional beamline components:
Neil Vaytet
Question (maybe mostly for the IDSs?): does anyone use the feature of the instrument view where you can display components other than detector pixels by passing a dict of components?
See an example here.
I have a feeling that it is not used much (if at all?), and maybe not so useful? It's not finding components from the Nexus files automatically, and even if it did I don't know if the visualization would be so useful?
You can use nexus-constructor
to view the geometry and the components.
I feel like when one uses the instrument view, it's mostly to look at the counts on the detector pixels, not to look at the position of the sample or choppers.
Am I correct? If so, would you care if we removed that feature?
Thanks for any opinion on this :pray:
Gregory Tucker
nexus-constructor
is valid long-term; if I understand correctly, there isn’t a desire for its view to be 100% accurate in all casesNeil Vaytet Thanks for feedback. About 2., aren't the RGB xyz axes indicators enough?
Gregory Tucker Maybe they become more-useful with experience? Looking at it as-if a new user, I see three lines that probably represent Cartesian axes, but don’t know which line corresponds to which axis, or whether their intersection is the origin.
Neil Vaytet So what could we add to make it more obvious? A semi-transparent plane (or a grid) below the instrument that represents the floor? (edited)
Gregory Tucker :shrug: I guess different ‘hints’ would help different people. I might like more-obvious axes — maybe labelling ‘0’, ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’ — but then you need to know that z is vertical; so there might not be a good general answer
Should the
instrument_view
be removed altogether? I see it's use could be quite limited if we are adding instrument-specific versions in the other packages (e.g.dream.instrument_view
).There is almost nothing in the instrument view compared to using Plopp's
scatter3d
directly, apart from the additional beamline components that can be shown, but experience has shown that this is basically unused.There is an additional maintenance burden of keeping both
scatter3d
andinstrument_view
. See #484 for example.See also #452