Dear All,
recent desktop versions of Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader have
built-in support for 3D models in PDF.
You can take a look at http://www.pdf3d.com/gallery.php for a gallery
of professional results achieved with a commercial tool.
For an overview of what 3D PDF can be used for I (naturally) suggest the article
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0069446 .
To bring together 3D PDF and R, I have enhanced "rgl" package with
necessary output routine, so you draw something in 3D using rgl and
after that say "save it as 3D PDF".
The resulting 3D PDF model can be used standalone or in your LaTeX document.
The source code of the package and demo output are at
http://www2.iaas.msu.ru/tmp/u3d/rgl/
I have successfully compiled and run my package on Mac OS 10.9 64bit,
Windows XP 32 bit, Ubuntu 13.04 i686 and 13.10 ppc, Fedora 18 64bit,
but received a crash report in undisclosed Linux environment on some
CRAN test platform.
Testers welcome, feel free to e-mail me if necessary (by the time
search finds you this post I may be off the list).
Sincerely, Michail