Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.1 "Virtuality!" SP1 released

Announcements
1

Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 Beta update “Virtuality” SP1 was released at 12th April 2023.
As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository.
The release tag is “3.0.19.1”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:

https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.19.1

Compatibility changes wrt. Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.0:

  • Octave 7.3 is required on Windows. Octave 8.1 is required on macOS, but Octave
    6.3 - 7.3 may also continue to work on macOS (untested as of 3.0.19.1).

  • Recommended operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04.2-LTS Linux, MS-Windows 10 22H2, macOS 12.6.

  • The macOS 10 (aka Mac OSX) and macOS 11 operating systems should continue to work, but
    are officially unsupported and unsupportable. Use of macOS 13, or running Psychtoolbox
    on Apple Silicon (M1, M2, …) is not officially supported by this release. Visual
    stimulation timing will be totally broken on Apple Silicon Macs, as well as some other
    features. It is our understanding that currently no vision science toolkit exists that
    could provide any reliable or trustworthy operation on macOS for Apple Silicon. On
    Intel based Macs, Psychtoolbox likely continues to be the only toolkit with somewhat
    trustworthy visual stimulation timing on most Intel Mac configurations.

Highlights:

All:

  • The main new feature, after over 800 hours of development, spread over 13.75 months,
    is our new OpenXR driver for virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality
    applications, known as eXtended Reality.     The new
    PsychOpenXR driver should work on all VR/AR/MR/XR devices from all vendors on all
    operating systems which have an OpenXR 1 specification compliant runtime installed on
    your machine. So far the theory.

    In practice, this means GNU/Linux X11 and MS-Windows 10 and later. This new 3.0.19.1
    release has been further refined and now also tested for compatibility with the HTC
    Vive Pro Eye (and presumably similar HMDs from the Vive series), and the associated
    “Vive Wand” hand controllers. Proper working of our new driver on HMDs from two different
    VR hardware vendors - Oculus and HTC - should give good confidence that the new OpenXR
    driver really works cross-vendor. Testing with the HTC Vive Pro Eye was performed with
    Valve SteamVR 1.25.7 as OpenXR runtime on both Windows 10 22H2 and on Ubuntu Linux
    20.04.6-LTS, and additionally also with Monado (with vive and survive backends) under
    Ubuntu Linux 20.04.6-LTS.

  • Improvements and fixes to all legacy VR drivers, and to VR test scripts and demos.

  • Minor bug fixes and improvements.

  • Various help text and documentation updates. Also spelling fixes to some code comments and
    docs contributed by Yaroslav Halchenko from the NeuroDebian project. He contributed some
    automatic spellchecking for our GitHub CI to reduce such mistakes over time.

  • Fixes by Alex Forrence to allow building Python wheels from source more easily.

Linux:

  • Add support for 64-Bit Octave 8.x, implemented via the shared mex files for Octave 4.4 to
    Octave 8.x. This enables use with Octave on Ubuntu 20.04 - Ubuntu 23.04, and should also
    enable use on future Linux distributions. Note though that Octave 8.x compatibility is
    assumed at the moment, not actually tested, as upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 ships with Octave 7.3.

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.

  • Our new OpenXR driver now has the ability to provide accurate and trustworthy visual
    stimulus onset timestamps for VR HMD’s - as tested with Oculus Rift CV-1 and HTC Vive Pro Eye
    and some photo-diode measurements. This however currently only works with Linux and only
    with Monado as OpenXR runtime, and only with a slightly modified Monado runtime and a special
    set of Mesa Vulkan drivers for AMD and Intel gpu’s. It also comes at a performance cost.
    However, this combination of Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.1 and modified Monado + Mesa is to my
    knowledge the only existing modern VR system that can actually provide accurate and trustworthy
    timing and timestamping for VR applications on modern VR HMD’s. Read “Help PsychOpenXR”
    for setup instructions. A proper non-hacky, easy to use solution to VR timing problems is
    still to be done and will require substantial amounts of work.

    As part of this work, the CV1Test.m script has been improved for VR related timing tests,
    and FlipTimingWithRTBoxPhotoDiodeTest.m now optionally can also test VR HMD’s wrt. stimulus
    onset timing and timestamping. These test scripts were used to verify timestamping precision
    and reliability of the proprietary VR drivers (OculusVR, Oculus OpenXR, SteamVR OpenXR) or
    rather the terrible lack of reliability and precision, and the excellent reliability and
    precision of the hacked Monado OpenXR runtime on Linux.

  • Basic Vulkan display backend support for RaspberryPi 4 and 400 with VideoCore-6 gpu. This
    is very basic right now, and requires special setup and use of Mesa Vulkan drivers built
    from Mesa source code, the build and install automated by use of PiKISS. See instructions
    under ‘help RaspberryPiSetup’. This currently has little to no advantage over use of the
    standard OpenGL display backend. In fact, expect way less trustworthy visual timing and
    reduced graphics performance. The only use case at the moment would be convenient setup
    on a dual-display RaspberryPi 4/400 setup for experimenter GUI/mirror display + subject
    stimulus display, a split experimenter + subject configuration currently not supported by
    the standard display backend.

  • Fixes for Mathworks latest Matlab bugs since R2022b, this time breaking our Vulkan support
    by shipping a totally outdated and crippled libvulkan.so.1 loader library that overrides
    the system provided full featured loader. PsychLinuxSetup() will now detect this and
    rename the library to fix Mathworks latest screwup.

Windows:

  • 64-Bit Intel MSVC GStreamer version 1.20.5 is now required as minimum supported version,
    and GStreamer 1.22.1 is now recommended as most modern version, and also as the only lightly
    tested version for 3.0.19. High quality text rendering will fail with any earlier versions!

  • 64-Bit GNU/Octave 7.3 is required for running Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 on Octave, earlier or
    later versions won’t work! Substantial technical difficulties were encountered when trying
    to upgrade Psychtoolbox for Windows to the brand-new Octave 8.1, forcing me to give up after
    over 15 hours of work. The lack of funding for any such troubleshooting and maintenance work
    means that Psychtoolbox will be frozen/locked to Octave 7.3 until significant funding for
    such compatibility work becomes available, or until the problem magically resolves itself,
    in other words possibly never.

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.

  • Compatibility fixes for LoadIdentityClut() with AMD graphics card drivers on Windows,
    contributed by GitHub user @qx1147. The contributor has the following to say about this fix:
    “Tested with several Windows 10 versions, AMD driver versions, video ports (DP, DVI, DP++/DVI)
    and AMD cards (HD-7750, R7-250X, R7-260X, RX-550, RX-6400, WX-5100) - although not all
    combinations of these.” - The old code broke on a subset of these cards, depending on output
    port, card, driver versions and whatnot. This due to backwards incompatible changes that AMD
    apparently made to their display drivers gamma table and color conversion handling since
    summer/autumn 2017, when the same contributer last fixed LoadIdentityClut() for AMD driver
    changes which broke pixel identity passthrough. Example of a new bug, citing the contributor:
    “For example, for the Radeon RX550, the codes 9-254 would map to 8-253, but only for DP and
    DP++/DVI, whereas all is fine with DVI, at least with an older driver. With newer drivers,
    the mapping is also screwed up with DVI.”

macOS:

  • Upgrade to the brand new 64-Bit GNU/Octave 8.1 is recommended for running Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.1
    on Octave. Other Octave versions from the Octave 6.3/6.4 and 7.x series, or future Octave 8.x
    versions, may work as well, but no guarantees for anything other than Octave 8.1.

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.

  • Compatibility fixes for new GStreamer 1.22 releases.

Enjoy!