Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.3 release "Virtuality!" SP3 released

Announcements
1

Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 Beta update “Virtuality” SP3 was released at 13th July 2023.
As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository.
The release tag is “3.0.19.3”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:

https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.19.3

Compatibility changes wrt. Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.2:

  • Octave: Octave 7.3 is required on MS-Windows. Octave 8.2 is required on macOS,
    but Octave 6.3 - 8.1 may also continue to work on macOS (assumed, but untested).

  • Recommended operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04.2-LTS Linux, MS-Windows 10 22H2, macOS 13.4

  • The macOS 10 (aka Mac OSX) OS family, macOS 11 and macOS 12 operating systems will
    probably continue to work, but are now untested and officially unsupported and unsupportable.
    Running Psychtoolbox on Apple Silicon Macs (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
    if configured correctly for use with a properly installed PsychtoolboxKernelDriver.

  • Procedural shaders: Remove corrective offsets for hardware texture sampling, as
    it may be no longer helpful, but harmful, due to changes in gpu hardware drivers
    on all operating systems. See GitHub issue #800, reported by user @qx1147. Tests on
    AMD, NVidia and Intel gpu’s under Linux, Windows and macOS suggest this is the right
    thing to do now. This means that the centers of procedurally generated stimuli like
    Gabor patches or sine gratings will shift by 0.5 pixels on the screen.

Highlights:

  • Switch lightly tested and supported macOS version from macOS 12 Monterey to
    macOS 13 Ventura. Older macOS versions are untested and unsupported from now on.

All:

  • The new OpenXR driver has now also been tested with the HTC Vive Pro Eye and the
    associated “Vive Wand” hand controllers with Valve SteamVR 1.25.7 on Windows and Linux,
    and with Monado on Linux with “vive” and “survive” backends as OpenXR runtimes on
    (recommended going forward) Ubuntu Linux 22.04.2-LTS. Past successfull Linux tests
    were on - no longer tested - Ubuntu 20.04.6-LTS. The driver now also works with
    Octave 7.3 on MS-Windows.

  • DaqAInScanContinue: Try to fix live data retrieval on USB-1208FS when using more than one
    analog input channel. It could cause data loss or data to channel mapping misalignment
    when DaqAInScanContinue(daq, options, 1); was used with more than one input channel.
    Cfe. Sampling frequency of analogue input - #10 by Daq
    This is untested due to lack of hardware. Unpaid work time spent trying to diagnose and
    fix this: 4 hours.

  • Snd: Update help text, remove Octave specific quirks - no longer needed. Add a new function
    Snd('OldStyle'); to allow selection of old style audio output path on the fly, as
    addition to the former static only selection by creating a config file. Allows use of the
    old output path which simply uses Matlabs or Octaves sound() function, which is now
    available also on all supported Octave 5+ versions.

  • Make CalDemo work with graphics hardware gamma lut sizes other than 256 slots. Instead
    use the size of the actual luts stored in the loaded calibration file.

  • Try to fix and improve CalibrateMonSpd and related functions: It now also works on
    standard display setups other than visual stimulators from CRS and VPixx. Plus tons
    of bug fixes. Also it now also supports other colorimeters than the PR650. See the
    following link for the mess this tries to fix:

    Single row entries in "theClut" during calibration with a spectroradiometer (CalMonSpd)

  • Improve Eyelink('ImageTransfer'): Allow to pass in image matrices from Matlab/Octave,
    e.g., as read from image files via imread(), or retrieved from PTB drawing commands
    via Screen('GetImage'), or computed in scripts. Before this, it was only possible
    to load uncompressed BMP image files. Also fix the - previously broken - demos
    EyelinkPictureCustomCalibration and EyeLinkPicture. Untested on actual Eyelink, only
    tested in simulation due to lack of hardware.

  • Procedural shaders: Remove corrective offsets for hardware texture sampling, as
    it may be no longer helpful, but harmful, due to changes in gpu hardware drivers
    on all operating systems. See GitHub issue #800, reported by user @qx1147.

  • Minor bug fixes, documentation updates and improvements.

Linux:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.

  • PsychOpenHMDVR: Fix crash in ‘GetTrackingState’ if VR controllers are not present or
    are not supported. Also add HTC Vive Pro Eye specific undistortion shaders. Other minor
    improvements.

  • Eyelink: The mex files for Linux were upgraded to now use and require the SR-Research
    eyelink_core SDK and runtime version 2.0, instead of the old v1.9 runtimes. To run the
    new mex files you either need to manually set a symlink for mapping the new runtime name
    to the old runtime library name. Or install the recent v2 runtime from SR-Research. It is
    recommended to upgrade, as the new runtime contains nice bug fixes. E.g., the runtime no
    longer hangs if no Eyelink tracker hardware is connected, iow. Eyelink dummy mode fallback
    can now work. The most easy way to upgrade Ubuntu or Debian to the latest SDK is from a
    terminal via the following command-line:
    sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys https://apt.sr-research.com/SRResearch_key ; sudo add-apt-repository 'deb [arch=amd64] https://apt.sr-research.com S RResearch main' ; sudo apt install eyelinkcore
    or you follow the setup instructions at SR Support Forum - Help Documents

Windows:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.

  • The OpenXR driver now also works with Octave 7.3, in addition to Matlab.

macOS:

  • macOS Ventura (currently version 13.4.1) is the only officially lightly tested and
    supported macOS operating system, and only for 64-Bit Intel Macs. Support and testing
    for macOS 12 Monterey has ended, but macOS 12 is assumed to continue to work as before.

  • Upgrade to the brand new 64-Bit GNU/Octave 8.2 from HomeBrew is recommended for running
    Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.3 on Octave. Other Octave versions from the Octave 6.3/6.4 and 7.x
    series, Octave 8.1, or future Octave 8.x versions, may work as well, but no guarantees
    for anything other than Octave 8.2 from HomeBrew.

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2022b.

Enjoy!

2

Thanks as always for the numerous improvements and fixes (I’ll need to check my procedural shader code too)…

Note there is a mess at the moment relating to SR Research – they have updated the Eyelink toolbox that is downloaded with their SDK. They made an installer script that overwrites the eyelink mex and toolbox files, yet it breaks at the moment as they hardcode the various octave folders when backing up. I have alerted them to this some time ago and they were going to upstream but I haven’t seen anything from them yet. You can see the changes in this branch I made from their update: Comparing kleinerm:master...iandol:neweyelinkcode · kleinerm/Psychtoolbox-3 · GitHub – a new pull will be needed with the integrated mex source and the toolbox changes of course…

See here for more details: SR Support Forum (and an even older SR Support Forum) – I pinged them on that thread alerting them of your new changes…

3

I’m in contact with them wrt. integrating those Eyelink toolbox updates into PTB properly. They intend to ship another update of that separate Eyelink toolbox with their upcoming v2.1 SDK update. I haven’t installed those parts of the SDK on my machines, only the eyelinkcore package which is sufficient for Eyelink toolbox and mex files, so don’t know what kind of trouble the current approach brings. They want to get that out the door first. But probably after my vacation / late summer / autumn something should hopefully happen.

The Eyelink('ImageTransfer') improvements, and the upgrade of our Eyelink mex files for the current SDK/runtime on Linux, are first results of this collaboration between them and myself. This collaboration is only possible because SR-Research joined our partner program, so my work time for assisting with this is paid to some degree.

Anyhow, need to pack, already falling behind…
-mario

4

Sounds great, I don’t think there will be any major issues, I think the main issue are some backwards incompatibilities (which users use their new code will have to face, changes required are minor) and the continuing instabilities surrounding using snd for audio beep feedback during calibration on Ubuntu 22.04.

Hope you don’t reply due to you being on holiday and all :wink: