The Vision Egg is a powerful, flexible, and free way to produce stimuli for vision research experiments.

About

The Vision Egg is a high level interface between Python and OpenGL. In addition to methods for automatic generation of traditional visual stimuli such as sinusoidal gratings and random dot patterns, it has a number of functions for moving numeric data, images, movies, text, and 3D objects to and from your video card and allowing use of some of its features like perspective distortion. Therefore, it is also useful for anyone wishing to make use of the features of today's graphics cards.

• Perform experiments using an inexpensive PC and standard consumer graphics card
• Perform experiments using a graphics workstation if special features needed
• Data acquisition and other realtime hardware control capabilities useful in electrophysiology and fMRI experiments, including gaze-contingent stimuli
• Dynamically generated stimuli can be changed in realtime via software or external hardware
• Produce traditional stimuli to replace legacy systems
• Produce stimuli not possible using other hardware
• Demo programs to get you started right away
• Run stimuli on your laptop - great for talks
• Free, open-source software

By harnessing the incredible power of today's consumer graphics cards, producing visual stimuli of research quality now requires no specialized hardware beyond a relatively recent computer and graphics card.

Based on open standards, it runs on anything from cheap PCs to expensive special hardware for special needs. For example, running on some platforms, such as SGI workstations, the Vision Egg has a 10-bit luminance dynamic range (both pixel depth and DAC) and precise frame-by-frame control.

The Vision Egg is open source software (GNU LGPL). Therefore, you can be assured of a product that meets your needs but does not lock you in. Download it today and give it a try!

Citing the author

My (Andrew Straw's) first first-author paper using the Vision Egg has recently been made available for free download by the publisher, Journal of Experimental Biology. I humbly ask that if you use the Vision Egg for your experiments that you please cite my paper in your publications. The full citation is:

• 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. link

To see a partial list of publications that made use of the VisionEgg, see the citations page.

Quick links

• download page (Check the Download page for more information.)

• subversion code repository (See SourceRepository for more information)