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Original Research ARTICLE

This article is part of a Research Topic

Vision Egg: an open-source library for realtime visual stimulus generation

Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

Modern computer hardware makes it possible to produce visual stimuli in ways not previously possible. Arbitrary scenes, from traditional sinusoidal gratings to naturalistic 3D scenes can now be specified on a frame-by-frame basis in realtime. A programming library called the Vision Egg that aims to make it easy to take advantage of these innovations. The Vision Egg is a free, open-source library making use of OpenGL and written in the high-level language Python with extensions in C. Careful attention has been paid to the issues of luminance and temporal calibration, and several interfacing techniques to input devices such as mice, movement tracking systems, and digital triggers are discussed. Together, these make the Vision Egg suitable for many psychophysical, electrophysiological, and behavioral experiments. This software is available for free download at visionegg.org.

Keywords:

visual stimulus generation, open source, Python

Citation:

Straw AD (2008). Vision Egg: an open-source library for realtime visual stimulus generation. Front. Neuroinform. 2:4. doi: 10.3389/neuro.11.004.2008

Received:

15 September 2008;

Paper pending published:

26 September 2008;

Accepted:

08 October 2008;

Published online:

04 November 2008.

Edited by:

Rolf Kötter, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands Antilles

Reviewed by:

Laurent Perrinet, INCM-CNRS, France
Jonathan W. Peirce, University of Nottingham, UK

© 2008 Straw. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Andrew D. Straw, Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E. California Boulevard, Mail Code 138-78, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. e-mail: astraw@caltech.edu