How can I display the azimuth and elevation information on a figure in MATLAB?

When I use the the Rotate 3D tool at the top of a figure, I can see the azimuth (Az) and elevation (El) information at the bottom of the Figure. However, as soon as I release the mouse button, the information is no longer displayed. How can it be placed on the plot itself?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

The ability to show the azimuth (Az) and the elevation (El) on a figure after the mouse button has been released when using the Rotate 3D tool is not available in MATLAB.

To work around this issue, you can return the elevation (El) and the azimuth(Az) information using the 'view' function and then display the values as text in the figure.

Here is an example of a text box which displays this information:

figure; % create a figure
membrane % plot the membrane
tBox = annotation('textbox', [0, 0.05, 0.1, 0.1], 'LineStyle', 'none'); % create your text box and place it in about the same place as is automatically displayed
rotateObj = rotate3d(gcf);
rotateObj.ActionPreCallback = @(~,~)(set(tBox, 'String', []));% don't want our text box when the automatic one is around
rotateObj.ActionPostCallback = @(~, event_obj)(set(tBox, 'String', ['Az: ', num2str(event_obj.Axes.View(1)), ' El: ',num2str(event_obj.Axes.View(2))])); % populate when done rotating
rotate3d on

Here are the relevant documentations for your reference:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/annotation.html

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.graphics.interaction.internal.rotate3d.html#zmw57dd0e724545