>Psychtoolbox>PsychDemos

PanelFitterDemo - Demonstrate use of the panel fitter.

This demo shows how to use Screen()’s panel fitter function by using the
high-level setup code in PsychImaging().

The panelfitter allows to implement “rotated framebuffers”, which have a
shape (width and height in pixels) that corresponds to a display device
that is rotated by increments of 90 degrees with respect to its “natural”
upright orientation (typically landscape). E.g., assume you have a flat
panel with a natural landscape orientation - more wide than high - and a
resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. Now for some reason you want to turn
your panel into “portrait” orientation - more high than wide - by
rotating it by 90 degrees. Drawing stimulus images for such a rotated
display would be inconvenient, as everything would be shown tilted by 90
degrees to your subject. Here the panelfitter can help by providing a
framebuffer that is rotated by 90 degrees wrt. its normal shape, ie., the
framebuffer is 1080 x 1920 pixels in size instead of its natural 1920 x
1080 pixels. Drawing into such a framebuffer becomes natural and easy
again, as the shape and orientation of the framebuffer corresponds to the
effective shape and orientation of your display device.

Such rotations can be requested from the panelfitter by the
PsychImaging(‘AddTask’, ‘General’, ‘UseDisplayRotation’, angle); command.

Why not simply use the “Rotate display” buttons or settings in the
display control GUI of your operating system? Because the method by which
operating systems and graphics cards do implement that display rotation
will usually severely interfere with visual stimulus onset timing and/or
stimulus onset timestamping – you lose control over your stimulus
presentation timing. Our panelfitter makes sure timing stays under
control.

Another application of the panelfitter is if you want to operate your
flat panel or video projector at a different resolution or image size
than its native resolution. Good old CRT monitors didn’t have a native
resolution, they were happy to display at a wide range of different
resolutions and refresh rates. Modern flat panels and projectors do have
only one true native resolution, which is their maximum resolution, due
to their fixed pixel grid. If you want to set such a display to a
different resolution, your graphics hardware or display device will use
digital image processing to scale and resize the input video signal from
its set resolution to the native resolution of the device. This
introduces lag due to processing delays, and possibly non-deterministic
timing variance in visual stimulus onset, therefore you should avoid such
non-native resolutions and run your displays at native (maximum)
resolution. If you still want to display stimulus images at a different
size than the panels native resolution, the panelfitter can help you. It
provides you with a framebuffer of selectable size and then performs the
scaling and resizing of the stimulus image in that framebuffer to the
true size of the panels framebuffer resolution. In other words, it fits
the content onto the panel, hence the name “panelfitter”. You can use the
PsychImaging(‘AddTask’, ‘General’, ‘UsePanelFitter’, fitSize, ‘Centered’);
command to define the size of your framebuffer (‘fitSize’) and the
strategy for placing and scaling the image onto the panel.

Again, operating systems allow you to select different resolutions and
fitting modes in their display GUI controls, but the methods by which
non-native resolutions and fittings are implemented by current operating
systems and graphics cards can severely interfere with stimulus onset
timing and timestamping, or with low level stimulus properties, due to
the digital filtering, resampling and blurring involved. Our panelfitter
prevents timing artifacts and gives you more control over other
properties.

Please note that use of our panelfitter is also not totally free:

a) Currently display rotation and image scaling don’t go well together.
One or the other works well, but both combined can exhibit bugs and
artifacts. These are limitations of our current high-level setup code.
You could probably use the Screen(‘PanelFitter’) low-level setup
command directly to get a well working solution for your specific
needs, should you require scaling and rotation at the same time. Or
you could fix and extend our high-level setup code in PsychImaging.m.

b) Multisample anti-aliasing does not work together with display rotation
on older graphics hardware, or with Apple OSX versions up to and
including 10.9 “Mavericks”. It will work on modern GPU’s under Linux
or Windows if they at least support OpenGL 3.2, but not on the same
GPU’s under OSX, as this is a purely political restriction introduced
by Apple, making OSX less useful than it could be.

c) There is a small performance impact on the order of < 1 millisecond
per Screen(‘Flip’) with modern graphics cards due to the processing
involved.