Welcome to PsychXR’s Documentation¶
PsychXR is a collection of Python extension libraries for interacting with eXtended Reality displays (HMDs), intended for neuroscience and psychology research applications.
The goal of this project is to provide researchers in the vision science community free and flexible tools to experiment and prototype ideas with virtual reality hardware using the Python programming language. Allowing users to directly leverage the vast ecosystem of scientific libraries associated with it (e.g. SciPy, NumPy, PyTorch, etc.)
PsychXR provides a lightweight interface to hardware drivers with extra tools to simplify some aspects of creating virtual reality applications. However, this library does not handle the actual rendering of VR scenes or audio. Knowledge of OpenGL is required at this time to create images and present them on the HMD. However, researchers may consider using PsychoPy which uses PsychXR for HMD support, but also provides a means of rendering 3D stimuli and developing psychophysics experiments.
Contents¶
Source Code¶
PsychXR is open-source, the source code is freely available for review and modification. The source code repository is hosted on GitHub. There you can also submit bug reports and pull requests.
PsychXR is mostly written in Cython a superset of the Python language. If you plan on adding features to PsychXR, knowledge of Cython is highly recommended.
Hardware Support¶
As of now, only the Oculus Rift series of HMDs are supported (DK2, CV1, S) via
the libovr driver interface which uses the official PC
SDK. However, additional drivers are being considered to be included in the
future using OpenXR and
OpenHMD.
A preview for the OpenHMD interface is available as of version 0.2.4.
How to Cite PsychXR¶
If you use PsychXR in one of your projects, please consider citing it using the following:
Cutone, M. D. & Wilcox, L. M. (2021). PsychXR (Version 0.2.4) [Software]. Available from https://github.com/mdcutone/psychxr.