Developers log

It is clear, that not everyone is happy with WLJS rendering engine. Some styles might be different or look different from the traditional Mathematica's plots. For this reason we have MMAView allowing to use built-in raster rendering engine of Wolfram Engine.

But is it possible to animate things or use Manipulate together with MMAView?

Short answer: kinda

MMAView[]

acts indirectly using parallel kernel to build and render the given expression, which is already async operation. Having it inside Manipulate or Animate makes it 2x async, which is not possible in Wolfram Kernel. Therefore most likely you will get

Timeout!

Animation​

Utilizing raster dynamics of Image and manually updating pixel data, one can achieve the desired effect:

1. prepare frames of animation

frames = Table[MMAView @ Plot[Sin[y x], {y,0,10}], {x, 0.1, 1.0, 0.05}];

2. animate frames

Module[{buffer = ImageData[frames//First, "Byte"]},
  Animate[Image[buffer // Offload, "Byte"], {i, 1, Length[frames], 1},
    "UpdateFunction" -> Function[i,
      (* stabilize raw image size *)
      buffer = ImageData[ImageCrop[frames[[i]], ImageDimensions[frames // First]], "Byte"];
      False (* prevent full refresh *)
    ]
  ]
]

Manipulate​

Here we need to forget about Manipulate or ManipulatePlot and define directly all sliders and etc. Also MMAView is a blocking function and does not provide a control over the rasterization process. However we can do it all at the low level anyway

With[{function = Plot[Sin[#1 x], {x,0,10}]&},
 With[{firstImage = MMAView[function[1]]},
  With[{dims = ImageDimensions[firstImage]},
    Module[{buffer = ImageData[firstImage, "Byte"]},
      {
        EventHandler[InputRange[0, 2, 0.1, "Label"->"w"], Function[w,
          Then[ParallelSubmitFunctionAsync[Function[{args, cbk},
              cbk @ ImageData[ImageCrop[Rasterize[function @ w], dims], "Byte"]
            ], {all}], Function[imgData,
              buffer = imgData;
          ]];
        ]],

        Image[buffer // Offload, "Byte"]
      } // Column 

    ]
  ]
 ]
]

Viola

PS: Most probably we need to make a wrapper for such things 🧙🏼‍♂️

UPD​

Screw that! We made it 🎈

Graphics3D​

We have a special wrapper for Graphics3D -like plots to make them interactive in the session

With[{p = Plot3D[f[x] y, {x,0,10}, {y,0,10}]},
  MMAView[p]
]

See more examples in the documentation!