[visionegg] Re: General question about Visionegg

The Vision Egg is an attempt to reduce the reinvention-of-the-wheel that happens in stimulus programming in visual neuroscience. Although one can certainly do everything it does using the same or different components, my hope is that people adapt it to their own uses and contribute those changes back to the project. Thus, I hope the repeatability of experiments is increased, that the barrier to entry for new experiments is reduced, bugs are eliminated, and visual neuroscience gains as a benefit.

The potential benefits to the Python programmer of using the Vision Egg include:

* being able to use the the electrophysiology-oriented server and GUI program with stimuli designed for use elsewhere (furthermore, in the current CVS code which will be released soon, very simple demo scripts can be used in the server/gui environment)

* additional routines for timing, parallel-port code, and other functions

* a variety of pre-existing stimulus types with a modular system for designing new stimuli

Furthermore, the code has been used by numerous people all over the world. Myself and others have tried to address any concerns and fix any problems raised. Thus, I think we benefit from a continuous and ongoing "peer review", hopefully resulting in high quality code with few bugs.

The modular design of the Vision Egg was made specifically to allow use of certain components without others. If you need to use none of these parts, there is of course no benefit in using the Vision Egg. Writing custom control loops (not using VisionEgg.FlowControl) is needed for some experiments, but totally unnecessary in others. Are there particular areas in which you think useful additions could be made?

Cheers!
Andrew

R.E. Crist wrote:

Hi. I have been writing stimulus display routines using Python, Pyopengl
and Pygame. Though I have been aware of the Visionegg project for
sometime, it has never seemed clear to me what it provides in addition to
these other packages. From what I can gather, it is generally necessary to
write what is termed a custom control loop in the Visionegg Programmer's
Manual. If this is the case, it seems that, if you are not using
stimuli which provided by the package, you wouldn't really be using
anything provided by the Visionegg package at all.

I assume that I am missing something and I certainly don't intend to
denigrate the efforts of the author. The package looks very interesting to
me (and much more sophisticated than my own code), which is why I
periodically return to the website and try to figure out if there is
something I can use.

Thanks in advance for any pointers anyone can offer.

Best regards,
Roy


...
R.E. Crist, Ph.D.
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Duke University
crist@xxxxxxxx
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