Intro and Overview¶
The Vision Egg is a powerful, flexible, and free way to produce stimuli for vision research experiments.
About¶
The Vision Egg is a high level interface between Python and OpenGL. In addition to methods for automatic generation of traditional visual stimuli such as sinusoidal gratings and random dot patterns, it has a number of functions for moving numeric data, images, movies, text, and 3D objects to and from your video card and allowing use of some of its features like perspective distortion. Therefore, it is also useful for anyone wishing to make use of the features of today’s graphics cards.
- Perform experiments using an inexpensive PC and standard consumer graphics card
- Perform experiments using a graphics workstation if special features needed
- Data acquisition and other realtime hardware control capabilities useful in electrophysiology and fMRI experiments, including gaze-contingent stimuli
- Dynamically generated stimuli can be changed in realtime via software or external hardware
- Produce traditional stimuli to replace legacy systems
- Produce stimuli not possible using other hardware
- Demo programs to get you started right away
- Run stimuli on your laptop - great for talks
- Free, open-source software
By harnessing the power of today’s consumer graphics cards, producing visual stimuli of research quality now requires no specialized hardware beyond a relatively recent computer and graphics card.
Based on open standards, it runs on anything from cheap PCs to expensive special hardware for special needs. For example, running on some platforms, such as SGI workstations, the Vision Egg has a 10-bit luminance dynamic range (both pixel depth and DAC) and precise frame-by-frame control.
The Vision Egg is open source software (GNU LGPL). Therefore, you can be assured of a product that meets your needs but does not lock you in. Download it today and give it a try!
Citing the Vision Egg¶
If you use the Vision Egg for anything that results in a scientific publication, I ask that you please cite my paper in your publications. The citation is:
- Straw, Andrew D. (2008) Vision Egg: An Open-Source Library for Realtime Visual Stimulus Generation. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. doi: 10.3389/neuro.11.004.2008 link
To see a partial list of publications that made use of the VisionEgg, see Vision Egg Citations.
Quick links¶
- downloads (Check the Download and Install page for more information.)
- Vision Egg @github
Full Documentation Contents¶
Contents:
- Vision Egg Citations
- Documentation
- Documentation/FAQ
- I enter my desired framerate in the “What will your monitor refresh’s rate be (Hz)” field of the Vision Egg startup GUI, but I get a different refresh rate. Why?
- I am unable to open a graphics window. I get the following exception: “pygame.error: Couldn’t find matching GLX visual”
- How to start without the configuration GUI appearing?
- I can not get the demos to work. The GUI Graphics configuration launches correctly when I try grating.py but when I click “ok” a new gray window opens for a few seconds and then closes. Can anyone help???
- How do I turn off the configuration window?
- I have set up my PC with a dual boot and have been gradually getting used to Linux. I would like to make the transition solely to Linux and the open source movement. However, I am running into one dependency problem after another and have tried RPM and tar.gz files. I even have a few experienced Linux users around and we still can not get all the dependencies installed.
- How do I specify where on my screen the display should go? If I create a window, I know how to direct the graphics to a certain location within that window, but how do I set the position of the window itself?
- When using certain stimuli, including the demo versions of the moving grating and put_pixels, I sometimes see an artifact that travels from the bottom of the window to the top. It usually looks like a slightly jagged line, and usually travels across the entire screen slowly to the top. I’m not sure if this is a programming issue or something that is specific to my monitor. It’s an LCD monitor running at 60Hz, and that’s what vision egg is set to use.
- When I run a stand-alone VisionEgg windows executable created with py2exe, I get the error “IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘...library.zip\OpenGL\version’
- What are my anti-aliased points appearing as squares (instead of circles)?
- Documentation/Tutorial
- Download and Install
- Download and Install/An Installation Overview
- Download and Install/Install on IRIX
- Download and Install/Install on Linux
- Download and Install/Install on MacOSX
- Download and Install/Install on Windows
- Intro and Overview/About this wiki
- Intro and Overview/Calibration
- Intro and Overview/FrameRates
- Intro and Overview/Platforms
- Screenshots
- Intro and Overview/Synchronization
- Intro and Overview/Technologies
- Miscellaneous
- Miscellaneous/CreditsAndThanks
- Miscellaneous/LabView
- Miscellaneous/SimilarSoftware
- Miscellaneous/UsersAndFriends
- News
- Frontiers in Neuroscience commentary - 2009-10-05
- talk at SciPy 09 (video available online) - 2009-08-20
- talk and tutorial at CNS*2009 - 2009-07-22
- Vision Egg 1.2.1 released - 2009-07-21
- Vision Egg article in Frontiers in Neuroinformatics - 2008-10-08
- BCPy2000, using the Vision Egg, released - 2008-10-01
- Vision Egg 1.1.1 released - 2008-09-18
- Vision Egg 1.1 released - 2008-06-07
- Vision Egg 1.0 released - 2006-01-03
- Quest.py announced - 2005-04-08
- Pylink (by SR Research) - Eye tracking in Python - 2004-02-25
- Release 0.9.9 - 2003-09-19
- Quest