[visionegg] Re: Questions before committing to VisionEgg

Dear Timothy,

Thanks for your interest and kind comments. I'll answer your specific questions below...

Timothy Vickery wrote:

Dear Andrew,

I am seriously contemplating a switch to VisionEgg (from
Matlab/Psychtoolbox), based on the fact that it is free, relatively
platform-independent, open-source, and appears to be very powerful. I
require software for testing human subjects in visual cognition
experiments. However, before switching and investing time in learning
a new language and API, I have a couple of questions that I hope you
will have time to answer. If I go with this package I will be more
than happy to tirelessly promote your software.

1.) What is your (and your collaborators) long-term commitment to this
project? It would be disappointing to find the project completely
abandoned in a couple of years.


I cannot speak for anyone else working on the Vision Egg (who I encourage to chime in here), but I am personally committed to keeping the Vision Egg open source and doing bug fixes for the forseeable future (time scale of years). I am planning on doing a few more temporal calibrations and then both releasing 1.0 and submitting a manuscript for publication.

I have recently joined the Dickinson Lab at Caltech as a postdoc. Although not a vision lab per se, I am planning on using and maintaining the Vision Egg as part of my work here, albeit probably with a different emphasis than the electrophysiology and psychophysics stuff I was doing with my Ph.D. supervisor David O'Carroll at the Universities of Washington and Adelaide. I have come to an agreement with the Caltech IP folks that my new work on the Vision Egg will continue to be released under an open source license. (I am planning to do experiments based on improved realtime behavior/gaze-contingent visual stimulation work originally described in "Context-dependent stimulus presentation to freely moving animals in 3D", Fry SN, Muller P, Baumann HJ, Straw AD, Bichsel M, Robert D JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE METHODS 2004.)

To consider adding major new functionality not directly associated with my own work is more difficult -- I don't have enough time at the moment to do so, at least without getting paid. This could be considered a good thing (stability) and/or a bad thing (lack of new exciting features, currently shortcomings).

Of course, I will be happy to accept, advise, and integrate improvements from the community for the forseeable future.

So, after the 1.0 release, I forsee mainly bug fixes and integration of any major new functionality that may come from the community. That said, I think the Vision Egg has most of the functionality I sought to implement at the outset, and is a useful, general purpose visual stimulation library.

2.) Is it easy to extract screenshots/movies from experiments? People
love to see pretty pictures. In psychtoolbox, where you directly
control every frame's composition, it is easy to do a screen grab, and
I wonder if this has a comparable capability.


Yes. The Screen.get_framebuffer_as_array() and Screen.get_framebuffer_as_image() functions do exactly that:
http://www.visionegg.org/reference/VisionEgg.Core.Screen-class.html#get_framebuffer_as_array

3.) Do you have any idea how reliable is the timing for keypresses and
mouse input in python?


This is more of an OS/driver thing than a Python thing, and I'm afraid I haven't delved too deeply into it. However, I believe the parallel port on PCs is a good low-latency route because its bits are directly accessible in memory.


I appreciate any response. Thanks for creating this software and
making it available to the community.
-Tim


Thank you.  Best wishes with your own endeavors.

Cheers!
Andrew

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