[visionegg] Re: visionegg and psychopy

Darren Weber wrote:
> What are the main differences between visionegg and psychopy?  At
> first glance, they seem to be the same thing.
Jon Peirce, the author of PsychoPy, evaluated Vision Egg in its early
days and then decided to implement PsychoPy. At that time, the VE was
primarly being used by myself for studies where motion-adaptation was a
critical issue. Therefore, I had a flow control infrastructure integral
to much of the code and implemented asynchronous event processing.
Later, I separated out much of this stuff to the FlowControl module and
added demos such as dots_simple_loop.py with a more procedural calling
style. By that time, Jon had already implemented the beginnings of PsychoPy.

I have not looked at PsychoPy's underlying drawing algorithms to
determine how similar they are.

From a quick glance at PsychoPy's website, I don't see that 3D drawing
is supported in any way. This was used, for example, in our paper Straw,
A.D., Warrant, E.J., & O'Carroll, D. C. (2006) A 'bright zone' in male
hoverfly (Eristalis tenax) eyes and associated faster motion detection
and increased contrast sensitivity. /Journal of Experimental Biology/
2006 *209*(21): 4339-4354.
http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/short/209/21/4339 to generate
sinusoidal stimuli properly distorted despite the fact that the display
was very close to the observer. I think a lot of the insect vision
community finds the VE useful for this feature.

In his own words (from Peirce, JW (2007) PsychoPy-Psychophysics software
in Python. J Neurosci Methods, 162(1-2):8-13):
> For a good programmer, Vision Egg
> achieves its goals very well, providing a powerful and highly
> optimized system for visual stimulus presentation and interactions
> with hardware (including the ability to run experiments
> remotely across a network). Straw does, however, adhere very
> strongly to an object-oriented model of programming which can
> be harder for relatively inexperienced programmers, like most
> scientists, to understand. For instance, the temporal control of
> experiments in Vision Egg is predominantly though the use of
> presentation loops, whereby the user sets an object to run for
> a given length of time, attaches stimuli to it, attaches it to a
> screen and then tells it to ‘go’.
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