Psychtoolbox updated

kleinerm

Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 update “Eyegazer” was released at 18th May 2024. As usual, the complete development history can be found in our GitHub repository. The release tag is “3.0.19.11”, with the full tree and commit logs under the URL:

https://github.com/Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3/tree/3.0.19.11

Some of this Psychtoolbox release was sponsored by Mathworks under the year 2023/2024 contract..

Our partner SR-Research, makers of the Eyelink gaze trackers, sponsored the major 2024 Eyelink toolbox update.

Compatibility changes wrt. Psychtoolbox 3.0.19.10:

  • None expected. But possibility due to massive Eyelink toolbox changes.

Highlights:

  • Big Eyelink toolbox update by SR-Research with the most massive improvements in over a decade.

All:

  • Release of the new Eyelink toolbox. This is the biggest update of the Eyelink toolbox for Eyelink gaze trackers from SR-Research since over a decade! Most of the work was done by the team at SR-Research. Credits to Brian Richardson, Marcus Johnson, and Kurt Debono. Additional 88 hours of my work time were sponsored by SR-Research, to provide code review, feedback and advice on improving the integration while maintaining backwards compatibility, and code improvements. Among many other improvements, the new Eyelink toolbox can integrate better with PsychPortAudio for playing feedback sounds during tracker calibration, and it can use dynamic animated calibration targets by playing back movies. Upload of backdrop images to the tracker host computer is possible. Stereoscopic/Binocular display modes of Psychtoolbox are now supported for use with the gazetracker. Many new functions have been added to improve ease and efficiency of use. A new set of demos demonstrates efficient use and best practices with the new toolbox. Legacy functions should be still supported for backwards compatibility, but many legacy demos have been removed. The toolbox has been carefully tested by SR-Research on all supported operating systems, so we hope this major update will go without major problems. Thanks to our partner SR-Research for this contribution and the team at SR-Research for good collaboration!

  • CedrusResponseBox(): Disable any flow control. It was supposed to use hardware flow control (FlowControl=Hardware), but that did not work until PTB v3.0.19.6 due to an IOPort parameter handling bug. Since the bug is fixed, hardware flow control would be used. This was supposed to make Cedrus to work more robust, but it apparently had the opposite effect, as the following PTB forum message suggests:

    https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/waiting-forever-for-data-transmission-with-cedrus-rb/5319

    Disable flow control explicitely, to revert to pre 3.0.19.6 behaviour, where Cedrus boxes worked as well as they could.

    If this fixes the bug though, that means my original opinion about the quality of Cedrus hardware - or the lack thereof - would be true, and the fragile communication was not caused by our IOPort driver bug, ie. by lack of hardware flow control. Let’s see…

  • ImagingStereoMoviePlayer.m: Also handle top-bottom stereo encoded movies.

Linux:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2023b.

  • Fix most basic compatibility with Ubuntu 24.04.0-LTS. Extensive compatibility testing with Ubuntu 24.04-LTS is still outstanding.

  • Fix Matlab R2020 - R2024a plotting on Intel graphics. After this Matlab bug being reported to Mathworks and going unfixed for multiple years, I decided to cave and add a workaround to PsychLinuxConfiguration(). It will add some config option during post-install to Matlab’s Java JOGL OpenGL interface, to avoid use of OpenGL ARB contexts. This works around the Matlab bug and makes Matlab’s graphics and plotting functions work on Intel graphics chips.

  • Refine PsychCV’s Apriltags implementation. Make sure that if the same marker is apparently detected multiple times in an image, that then the detection with the lowest hamming error and highest score is returned, so good detections can’t override false positive noise. Allow limiting the number of markers used from a tagFamily, so one can select tag families whose total marker count would cause a very high memory consumption, leading to out-of-memory errors on machines with even 8 GB of RAM, or very long startup times, by only using a subset of markers. Allow to select more tuning parameters for marker detection. Suppress useless debug output.

  • Screen(‘OpenVideoCapture’): Allow to disable videorate converter during recording.

Windows:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2023b.

  • PsychPortAudio: Use auto samplerate conversion under WASAPI shared mode with reqlatencylcass 0 or 1 (the default). This should allow to request arbitrary audio sample rates, as the operating system should perform proper sample rate conversion. Should automatically fix issues like the following:

    https://psychtoolbox.discourse.group/t/ptb-thinks-usb-sound-card-doesnt-support-44100hz/5324

    For now this is only implemented for Octave, not yet Matlab, until it can be tested a bit more.

macOS:

  • Psychtoolbox was built and lightly tested against Matlab R2023b and Octave 8.4 from HomeBrew. It also works on the new Octave 9.1 from HomeBrew

Enjoy!