Right. That's why I mentioned plotly and the like. I think rbokeh, and highcharter do this as well. You might want to take a look at the htmlwidgets gallery: http://www.htmlwidgets.org/showcase_rbokeh.html
Nathan Yau (http://flowingdata.com/) is definitely a base-user, and he does lots of interactives, but IIRC, most of them involve d3 and JavaScript.
Definitely a lot of interactive options discussed in the thread below, as well:
Looks like pairsD3 is pretty much built for your use case: