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. See issue #89.
• Add visuals, i.e. encapsulate existing code (e.g. antialiased lines) in Visual classes.
• OpenCL interoperability
• More examples/use-cases (with issue #89, these can become tests as well).
• Make vispy.gloo standalone (issue #52)
• webgl backend implementation (but needs design first, see above)
• Pick one of the issues, e.g. #97.
• ... Whatever you think is useful :)

Technical notes to be aware of

• WebGL backend
• Static WebGL backend
• Visuals & scene graph

Program

Wednesday 19

Session 1: Individual presentations (9h-10h30)

Presentation of the developers and the ESRF (field, interest to scientific graphics, previous work in graphics, interest in vispy). (15-20 min each)

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

Coffee break (10h30-11h)

Session 2: Introduction to Vispy (11h-12h45)

1. What is Vispy? (AK, 15 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 (AK)

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

3. GLOO. (NR)
4. Visuals, GUIs, and MVC. (CR, 20 min)
5. Transforms, shader chaining, scenegraphs, Qt GraphicsView. (LC, 20 min)
6. High-level interfaces. (CR, 15 min)

Lunch

Session 3: Advanced topics (1h30)

1. gl-agg, antialiasing. (NR, 15 min)
2. MPL backend. (NR, 15 min)
3. WebGL backend. (CR, 20 min)
4. Visualization of HDF5 files. (CR, 10 min)
5. ...

Session 4: Use cases (30+ min)

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

1. Visualization and manipulation of electrophysiological recordings. (CR, 10 min)
2. ESRF staff?
3. ...

Thursday 20

• Design, discussions, coding.

Friday 21

• Design, discussions, coding.