Q:

How to create an Orbit Chart in R? (Plotly/ggplot2)

I have spent time researching with no direction on how to create an orbit chart
I would ideally like to be able to create interactive versions (such as Plotly) but a ggplot2 would suffice as well.
Any suggestions are much appreciated!

A:

For a weekly vis contest some time ago, I created some charts like this.  I think the commonly accepted term now is "connected scatterplot".  
Here is the skeleton plotly code I used. 
plot_ly(
  df,
  x = x_var,
  y = y_var,
  group = group_var,
  mode = "markers") %>%
  add_trace(
    x = x_var,
    y = y_var,
    xaxis = list(title = ""),
    yaxis = list(title = ""),
    group = group_var,
    line = list(shape = "spline"),
    showlegend = FALSE,
    hoverinfo = "none") 

You can look at the github repo for my submission which includes the code for both ggplot and plotly to produce connected scatterplots.

