pyvista-wasm

English | 日本語 | 繁體中文

PyVista-like API for VTK.wasm — bring intuitive 3D visualization to the browser using WebAssembly.

Try it with JupyterLite	Try it with Stlite	Try it with marimo

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Install
• Usage
• Presentation
• Differences from pyvista-js
• Citation
• Contributing
• License

Install

pip install pyvista-wasm

For Pyodide/stlite:

import micropip

await micropip.install("pyvista-wasm")

Usage

import pyvista_wasm as pv

plotter = pv.Plotter()
plotter.add_mesh(pv.Sphere(), color="red")
plotter.show()

Presentation

The PyCon JP 2026 talk introduces pyvista-wasm with live demos and a deep dive into the WASM rendering architecture:

View the slide deck

Talk details on pretalx

Differences from pyvista-js

This project replaces the vtk.js rendering backend used in pyvista-js with VTK.wasm (@kitware/vtk-wasm npm package).

Key differences:

• Rendering backend: VTK.wasm (WebAssembly port of VTK C++) instead of vtk.js (pure JavaScript reimplementation)
• API style: VTK.wasm uses vtk.vtkRenderer() factory functions on a namespace object, vs vtk.js's vtk.Rendering.Core.vtkRenderer.newInstance() hierarchy
• Initialization: VTK.wasm requires async initialization via vtkWASM.createNamespace() to load the WASM binary
• Feature parity: VTK.wasm provides access to the full VTK C++ API, enabling features not available in vtk.js

Citation

If you use pyvista-wasm in academic or project work, please cite it. See CITATION.cff for the full citation metadata, or use the BibTeX entry below:

@software{Koyama2026pyvista-wasm,
  author       = {Tetsuo Koyama},
  title        = {{pyvista-wasm: PyVista-like API for VTK.wasm}},
  year         = {2026},
  version      = {0.9.0},
  license      = {Apache-2.0},
  url          = {https://github.com/tkoyama010/pyvista-wasm}
}

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please open an issue or pull request on GitHub. See CONTRIBUTORS.md for the list of contributors.

License

Apache License 2.0 © Tetsuo Koyama