This update introduces support for “formless dot field” type stimuli, and various bug fixes and enhancements. Especially the IOPort driver has been improved again.

IOPort Serial port hardware support

The new IOPort driver has been refined in a few areas. The driver is still much work in progress, with a few useful features missing. However, it should be already a superior replacement for all old serial port drivers like PsychSerial, SerialComm and Matlabs serial objects for most purposes.

• IOPort('Write') now supports a blocking flag of 2 on all operating systems. The old Linux specific polling for “transmitter empty” has been moved to blocking = 3. A mode of 2 now polls for the number of pending bytes for writeout in the system write buffer and repeats the polling loop until pending bytes = 0. This is supported on all operating systems.

• IOPort('Write') now returns a couple of additional optional timestamps, useful for special timing calibration routines like the upcoming PsychRTBox.m driver, and for low-level debugging: A prewrite timestamp, a postwrite timestamp and a timestamp of last poll loop iteration (if used)…

• IOPort('Read') accepts (for blocking reads) a new optional setting PollLatency in IOPort('ConfigureSerialPort',...); The setting allows to select the idle time between unsuccessful poll iterations, to trade off the system load against time quantization in such time critical polling loops.

• IOPort('ConfigureSerialPort') allows via new options to enable asynchronous background reading of data from the serial port via a parallel background thread on MacOSX and GNU/Linux, this feature is not yet supported on Windows. If async read is enabled, IOPort('Read') will not directly fetch data from the serial port, but it will fetch data that has been read already in the background by the reader thread. This allows to automatically collect streaming data from serial port in the background, for later retrieval via ‘Read’ calls. This feature is experimental for now, its programming interface may change!

• Help texts have been improved as well.

Improvements and bug fixes to Screen and other drawing functions – The Visuals

• GetMouse on OS/X fixed: If used on multi-core Macintosh computers with many cores, e.g., MacPro 8 core machines and recent multi-threaded Matlab versions, the function crashed Matlab reliably on each single invocation, unless Matlabs GUI was disabled, ie. Matlab was run in -nojvm mode! This was a classic race-condition, probably present since the very first Psychtoolbox release around 1995! This bug only gets triggered with increasing probability on machines with large numbers of processor cores and on operating systems with efficient multi-threading support, so it basically never happened on single processor machines or under Mac OS 10.3 and earlier, and only very seldom on dual-core machines with recent Mac OS versions.

• Regression in anaglyph stereo mode fixed: Anaglyph stereo as demonstrated in StereoDemo with settings 6,7,8 and 9 didn’t work. This is fixed.

• Robustness improvements to Screen('DrawText') on OS/X: If a corrupt text string is supplied, the function doesn’t crash anymore, but abort with a (hopefully) diagnostic error message.

• Bugfix to Screen('DrawText') on Windows: If text is drawn into different windows (onscreen or offscreen) with different text sizes or other different font settings, text should be drawn properly, instead of sometimes applying wrong settings. This was a bug in the way textsettings are cached internally to improve speed.

• Screen('FillPoly') received a few performance optimizations. However most of them only had a minor impact on performance. Drawing of complex, concave, potentially self-intersecting filled polygons still needs substantial processing on the CPU and is therefore much slower than drawing of simple concave polygons or simple convex polygons (which are the fastest).

• Potential robustness improvement for Screen('FrameRect') against broken graphics drivers when setting ‘penSize’. This is a potential improvement, which may or may not help on broken drivers.

• DrawFormattedText: No longer aborts with error on empty text string as input, but simply does nothing in that case.

• moglmorpher: The fast 3D morpher contained special workaround code for some serious bugs in the ATI display drivers on OS/X Tiger 10.4.x. As i’ve learned, the drivers got fixed at least in Leopard 10.5.5, so when used on 10.5, the workaround caused malfunctions on the fixed drivers! Now we detect the OS/X version, and only enable the workaround on versions lower than 10.5.5. This works now on all 10.4 systems and 10.5.5. I don’t know how it behaves on 10.5.0 to 10.5.4, due to lack of a testing system.

• Small fix to VideoDelayLoopMiniDemo for use with built-in iSight cameras of some Macintosh computers. A bug in the OS/X operating system caused wrong image display on such cams.

• Fix a bug in PsychVideoSwitcher driver which caused the TTL trigger mechanism to fail. Also extended trigger function: One can select if trigger should happen at each ‘Flip’ until disabled, or for a predetermined number of ’Flip’s then auto-disable.

• PsychImaging: Add support code for setup of native 10 bpc framebuffers on supported ATI FireGL/Pro and NVidia GTX cards.

• Fix in ConvolutionKernelTest for error handling when invalid convolution kernels are passed.

• Minor other fixes and updates to help texts.

There are still a few unresolvable serious bugs in OS/X 10.5.3, 10.5.4 and 10.5.5, especially prominent with NVidia 8000 series hardware for which no workaround exists. E.g., multi-display operation (stereo setups) seems to be highly unreliable and dysfunctional. Frame sequential stereo on NVidia 8000 series hardware seems to be seriously broken in 10.5.5. Only Apple engineering will be able to fix this.

New or enhanced demos

• FDFDemo is a new demo: It demonstrates basic usage of the new moglFDF function, rendering an animated rotating “random dot” motion sphere. The moglFDF function allows to efficiently draw a special class of random dot “structure from motion” stimuli, so called “(F)ormless (D)ot (F)ields”. The algorithm is heavily inspired by the algorithm introduced by Jedediah M. Singer and David L. Sheinberg in their Journal of Vision paper “A method for the real-time rendering of formless dot field structure-from-motion stimuli” (Journal of Vision, 8, 1-8). It should behave mostly as the method described in that paper, but operate at a significantly higher speed if stimuli are demanding (e.g., high display resolution, large number of dots, complex underlying 3D geometry), as the moglFDF routine pushes nearly all compute intense operations onto the GPU, only random number generation and flow control are done on the CPU. However, as the paper doesn’t state actual benchmark numbers and i never had a look at their implementation, this is an unverified assumption so far. This code has been tested for multiple months in-house for complex 3D facial motion stimuli and worked well, but given its complexity there may remain more or less subtle bugs or limitations of the method for other classes of stimuli. Let me know if you find this routine useful and if you encounter limitations. One limitation is the need for half-way recent graphics hardware: Minimum requirements are a NVidia GeForce 6000 series card or later, or a ATI Radeon X1000 series card or later, more specifically hardware with support for or later and floating point framebuffers.

• ImagingStereoMoviePlayer Minor improvements.

• MovingLineDemo: Changed behaviour to be more useful for exposing the troubles with flat panels.

• AdditiveBlendingForLinearSuperpositionTutorial now also demonstrates how to use the TTL trigger mechanism of the VideoSwitcher device.

• BitsPlusCSFDemo contrary to its name now also supports optional output to VideoSwitcher device , ATI 10 bpc framebuffer and PseudoGray output (aka bit stealing). It also allows to display an intensity gradient test chart instead of a CSF chart.

Test scripts in PsychTests

• Minor improvements to dualhead display sync tests in GraphicsDisplaySyncAcrossDualHeadsTest and PerceptualVBLSyncTest.

• KeyboardLatencyTest now allows some assessment of the timing accuracy of response boxes, the response box from Cedrus, and the reaction time box from Xiangrui Li et al.

Misc other stuff

• SearchGammaTable and various display calibration routines improved by David Brainard, also improvements to CalDemo

• Fix annoying warning about unrecognized escape sequence for KbName on Linux.

• Modifications to SerialComm to translate a hardware path, e.g. /dev/cu.usbserial, to a port name and improvements to FindSerialPort by Christopher Broussard.