Vispy code camp @ESRF

Overview

• Dates: 19 February (morning) - 21 February (evening) 2014
• Location: ESRF, Grenoble, France. CTRM Meeting room.
• Participants:
  • Core developers (AK, CR, NR, LC)
  • ESRF staff
  • Potential users

Goals

We set a few goals that we hope to achieve during this code camp. We distinguish between implementation, design, and discussion.

• visuals (design & implementation)
• Scene layer (design & implementation) When this layer is established, it becomes much easier for other people to use vispy.
• How to integrate collections into the scene layer (design & implementation)
• webgl interface (discussing & design, maybe implementation)
• out-of-core plotting (discussion & design)
• discussing dependencies for fast code (like isosurface extraction)

Further, there are some goals that do not have our priority, but which may be nice for participants to work on:

• More GUI backends: wx, gtk, ... - a template is provided.
• Increase test coverage - let's aim for 100%!
• Functionality to test a rendered image with a reference. Some image processing required. Also incorporate this in Travis CI.
• Pick one of the issues.
• Add visuals, i.e. encapsulate existing code (e.g. antialiased lines) in Visual classes.
• OpenCL interoperability

Program

Wednesday 19

Session 1: The Developers (30 min)

Presentation of the developers (field, interest to scientific graphics, previous work in graphics, interest in vispy). (5 min each)

1. AK
2. LC
3. CR
4. NR

Session 2: Introduction to Vispy (2h00)

1. What is Vispy? (AK, 10 min)

• Why?
• What users are we targeting? (scientists, engineers, game developers...)
• Possibilities and use cases? (scientific plotting, computer art/demo scene, data visualization, games...)
• Rough overview of the different layers (which ones have been done, which ones remain to be done?)

2. Introduction to modern OpenGL (NR or AK?, 20 min)

• shaders, GLSL, VBOs, PyOpenGL, importance of batch calls

3. GLOO. (NR or AK?, 10 min)
4. Visuals. (CR, 10 min)
5. Transforms, shader chaining, scenegraphs, Qt GraphicsView. (LC, 20 min)
6. High-level interfaces. (CR, 10 min)

Lunch?

Session 3: Advanced topics (1h30)

Lighting talks (a few minutes each).

1. gl-agg, antialiasing. (NR, 5-10 min)
2. MPL backend. (NR, 5-10 min)
3. WebGL backend. (CR, 10 min)
4. Visualization of HDF5 files. (CR, 5 min)
5. GUIs, traits, MVC & visuals... (CR, 5 min)
6. ...

Session 4: Use cases (30 min)

Any participant can come and expose its use case in 5-10 min.

1. Visualization and manipulation of electrophysiological recordings. (CR, 5 min)
2. ESRF staff?
3. ...

Thursday 20

• Design, discussions, coding.

Friday 21

• Design, discussions, coding.