Support for Point-Spread Functions with Polygon Glyphs

There are various use-cases where plotting different glyphs dynamically (or apply a point spread function) for each data point based on each point’s parameters. An example is below.

Use-case
Imagine I want to make a plot of germ density on a petri dish over many trials. Each germ colony could be represented as a gaussian blur around a central point (x,y) with column parameters such as std_xx, std_xy, std_yx, std_yy, and max_density. I would like to plot the overall density of all these germ colonies (thousands or millions) across many dishes and experiments. To be clear, I do not have a series of points that make up each colony, but instead I have a single point representing the colony.

Currently, I do not know how to attempt this visualization datashaders.

Feature Discussion
A feature I would like to add would be:

  • A glyph that can take in a point spread function
  • A point spread function is passed the current pixel location (x,y) and various columns.
  • Suggest using the polygon glyph as a boundary
  • For each pixel in the glyph, add an intensity based on data-value * scalar
  • Scalar is output of the point spread function(pixel_x, pixel_y, columns)

This is my first open-source discussion. I am looking for forward to any feedback for approaches to the above problem and I would like to help contribute to solve this issue