Comet plot with slider

Does anyone know if we can get the comet plot to work with a slider. So that we can go back and forth in the comet plot. This will help in visualizing how the plot takes shape with time or at any particular time.

Or does anyone know of a tool that helps us do this?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

[Jaswanth]

Hi,

To create an interactive comet plot in MATLAB with a slider, you can use a combination of the comet function and a GUI slider to control the visualization. The comet function in MATLAB is typically used to create an animated plot, but you can manually update the plot based on the slider's value to achieve interactivity.

Please refer to following example of creating comet plot with slider:

function cometPlotWithSlider()
    % Create the figure and axes
    fig = figure('Position', [100, 100, 800, 600]);
    ax = axes('Parent', fig, 'Position', [0.1, 0.3, 0.8, 0.6]);

    % Generate data for the comet plot
    t = linspace(0, 2*pi, 100);
    x = cos(t);
    y = sin(t);

    % Create the slider
    slider = uicontrol('Style', 'slider', 'Min', 1, 'Max', length(t), ...
                       'Value', 1, 'Position', [150, 50, 500, 20], ...
                       'Callback', @updateComet);

    % Initial plot setup
    hPlot = plot(ax, x(1), y(1), 'b-', 'LineWidth', 2);
    hold on;
    hHead = plot(ax, x(1), y(1), 'ro', 'MarkerFaceColor', 'r');
    hold off;
    axis equal;

    % Update function for the slider
    function updateComet(~, ~)
        val = round(get(slider, 'Value'));
        % Clear previous plot
        cla(ax);
        % Update the comet plot
        comet(ax, x(1:val), y(1:val));
    end
end

The updateComet function updates the plot based on the slider's value by clearing the previous plot and drawing the comet plot up to the current slider value.

Following is the figure created from the above example code through which we can slide through the comet plot.

I hope the solution provided above is helpful.