25 February 2004 - Pylink (by SR Research) - Eye tracking in Python

SR Research, the makers of eye tracking hardware and software, have released Pylink.

Pylink can be used with the Vision Egg!

According to SR Research:

Pylink allows for tracker control, real-time data access, and
external synchronization with eye data via custom messaging.

Many people find Python to be a simpler, yet still powerful,
alternative to C.  Pylink can also be used in combination with the
excellent third party open source Vision Egg software; providing a
combined visual presentation and eye tracking scripting package.

Distributed with Pylink is a modified Vision Egg demo using realtime tracker data to move a Gaussian-windowed grating in a gaze-contingent fashion. Following this example, it should be easy to create other VisionEgg/Pylink scripts for a variety of vision experiments involving eye tracking.

19 September 2003 - Release 0.9.9

The Vision Egg 0.9.9 is here!

There are several major improvements. (The few changes that may break old code are detailed in the release notes included in this email).

There is nothing more I intend to add before I release Version 1.0 -- this is a release candidate subject to final testing and bug fixing, so I would appreciate all the abuse you can put it through. In particular, test/conform.py runs many tests on your system and reports the output.

Changes for 0.9.9:

• Screen.put_pixels() method for blitting of raw pixel data
• Support for QuickTime movies (currently Mac OS X only)
• Redesign of type check system for accuracy and clarity
• TrueType font rendering with SDL_ttf2
• Textures with alpha--bugfixes and examples
• Positioning of viewports and 2D stimuli can use relative positioning anchors
• Now requires Python 2.2 -- new style classes used to restrict attribute acccess
• Now requires pygame 1.5
• Renamed timing_func() to time_func()
• EPhysGUI saves absolute time a trial was started (to recontruct all stimuli)
• Allow use of pygame Surfaces as source of texture data
• Mipmaps of sphere-mapped sinusoidal grating to prevent spatial aliasing
• De-emphasis on Presentation and Controller classes (moved to FlowControl module)
• Changed orientations such that 0 degrees is right and 90 degrees is up.
• Bugfix in SphereMap module -- gaussian formula produced windows too wide by 2/sqrt(2)
• Allow conversion of 3D vertices into 2D screen coordinates
• Added wireframe azimuth/elevation grid with text labels
• Allow arbitrary orientation of textures and text with angle parameter
• FrameTimer class now available for use in your own main loops
• Use Python 2.3 logging module (copy included for use with Python 2.2)
• No installation of demos or documentation (get source or demo package)
• Many small enhancements and bugfixes

New tests:

• high-voltage regulation test for displays (Brainard et al., 2002)
• incomplete DC restoration test for displays (Brainard et al., 2002)
• unit-test suite: among many other things, pixel accuracy of textures

New demos:

• mpeg.py plays MPEG movies (currently seeking a free movie to include)
• quicktime.py plays QuickTime movies (currently Mac OS X only)
• convert3d_to_2d.py converts 3D positions to 2D positions
• dots_simple_loop.py uses own loop rather than Presentation class
• makeMovie2.py makes a movie with get_framebuffer_as_image() function
• mouse_gabor_2d.py shows a gabor wavelet under mouse and keyboard control
• mouse_gabor_perspective.py is sphereGratingWindowed.py improved and renamed
• mouseTarget_user_loop.py uses own loop rather than Presentation class
• multi_stim.py shows many stimuli at once

27 February 2003 - Release 0.9.4

I am proud to announce release 0.9.4 of the Vision Egg. A large number of features have been added. This is a major improvement on the last release, and I recommend all users upgrade.

This release features:

• Complete electrophysiology application (see below)
• Luminance and color calibration possible
• Constant visual angle (perspective-distorted) grating stimulus added
• Constant visual angle (perspective-distorted) gaussian and circular windows added
• 3D texture-mapped sphere stimulus added
• Random dot stimulus added
• Texture module re-written for ease-of-use, clarity, and support of dynamic texture updating
• Color grating stimulus added
• Support for plaids added
• Masks for gratings and textures implemented using multitexturing - uses high bit depth available on some hardware
• Vision Egg Programmer's Manual created
• GLTrace module for tracking all calls to OpenGL
• Many more minor features and bug fixes

New electrophysiology application features:

• Complete application with ready-to-run experiments
• Application extendible with new experiments by modifying example experiments
• Full-screen graphics possible with server application, GUI client controls experiments over TCP
• Automated sequence control, including sequences-of-sequences
• Stimulus onset timing calibration / verification support
• 3D position / perspective-distortion calibration support
• Parameters saved during experiments as Python or Matlab scripts
• Complete configurations can be saved and restored from file

All code written for the 0.9.3 release should continue to run on the 0.9.4 release. There may be some slight changes in functionality due to bug fixes.