>Psychtoolbox>PsychDemos

ExpandingRingsDemo([ringtype=0]) – Generate an “expanding rings”
stimulus by use of GLSL shaders and Psychtoolbox procedural textures.

This demo illustrates the use of “procedural textures” with Psychtoolbox.
A procedural texture is a texture that is not directly represented by an
image matrix in memory, but the image content of the texture is generated
on the fly during drawing of the texture by means of a small algorithm -
a shader. The shader implements some mathematical formula or model which
is evaluated to generate image content, or it reads content of a data
matrix and transforms it into a picture. Psychtoolbox supports both,
purely virtual textures of unlimited size that are purely algorithmically
generated, and hybrid textures where an algorithm transforms the textures
content into something to be drawn.

The algorithm has to be implemented by a GLSL shader program - a vertex
shader, geometry shader, fragment shader or any combination of them. The
shader program is read from a file, compiled and then attached to the
texture at texture creation time. Procedural textures only work with
graphics hardware that has sufficiently advanced support for (at least)
hardware fragment shaders.

This demo implements a procedural texture which shows a set of rings that
can expand and move. The shader gets attached to a purely virtual
texture. The texture is drawn via the standard Screen(‘DrawTexture’)
command – your graphics processor generates the image content of the
stimulus on the fly during drawing of the texture via execution of the
shader at each output pixel location.

The optional ‘ringtype’ parameter allows to select between different ring
shapes. Default type is zero:

0 = Hard transitions between red and yellow rings.
1 = Transitions are modeled as a smooth sine wave, softly fading from
yellow to red and back.