
Vispy: OpenGL-based interactive visualization in Python - todd8
http://vispy.org/index.html
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fogleman
I've been working on something similar.

[https://github.com/fogleman/pg](https://github.com/fogleman/pg)

Here are a couple of things I've created using it so far, beyond what's in the
pg examples folder:

[http://www.michaelfogleman.com/hirise/](http://www.michaelfogleman.com/hirise/)

[http://www.michaelfogleman.com/gps/](http://www.michaelfogleman.com/gps/)

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LBarret
it looks cool but it takes the control of the main loop, no ? The ability to
integrate an OpenGL scene in another framework in critical.

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jdreaver
I knew I liked vispy after I spent some time to write this Mandelbrot set
example [1]. I only knew a little bit of OpenGL, and it took me less than a
day to understand vispy's API and create it. This was also before the new
scenegraph functionality was rolled out (the example is based on the core app
and gloo modules).

The core development team is very receptive to issues and pull requests. They
all also have experience building their own Python visualization libraries, so
it's exciting to see how their ideas synthesize into vispy features.

[1]
[http://vispy.org/examples/demo/gloo/mandelbrot.html](http://vispy.org/examples/demo/gloo/mandelbrot.html)

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graphene
Anyone know how this compares to Mayavi?

Is it targeting different use cases, or just higher performance, or ...?

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rossant
Vispy dev here. Mayavi/VTK are mature, very powerful and feature-complete.
Vispy is not even close to offer the same amount of functionality. But
eventually, we hope it will.

The low-level OpenGL interfaces in Vispy are now relatively solid, and are the
foundations of higher-level, more abstract graphical interfaces we are
currently developing (similar to VTK and Mayavi). Our goal is to let
scientists easily create fast interactive visualizations in 2D and 3D without
any knowledge of OpenGL.

Here is a very early example of these higher-level interfaces:
[http://vispy.org/examples/basics/scene/surface_plot.html](http://vispy.org/examples/basics/scene/surface_plot.html)
We also have started to work on an OpenGL backend for matplotlib.

Finally, a few remarks:

* Vispy focuses on performance and big datasets (with tens of millions of points or more) with minimal memory footprint (using NumPy)

* Vispy is pure Python and depends just on NumPy, basically. VTK is a heavy C++ library, sometimes complicated to install.

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auxym
Vispy is what's been missing in the scientific python ecosystem, in my
opinion. I've been watching the project closely for a good while, glad to see
this release and will try it out as soon as possible.

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Fede_V
There was an excellent VisPy talk at EuroSciPy, not sure if Enthought has
already put the video on youtube. The team behind VisPy is excellent, and they
are doing really good work of making OpenGL usable from a high level language.

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joss82
Gloo looks like a superior alternative to the clunky pyopengl package.

Do you plan to distribute it separatly in the future?

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rossant
That's something we've been considering, indeed. Especially given that we now
ship our own OpenGL wrapper with ctypes.

In the meantime, you can just install vispy and import vispy.gloo: nothing
else will be imported. The dependencies are the same (just NumPy).

FYI, although gloo's interface is now relatively stable, we're likely to
change its internals very soon. This should lead to a cleaner, smaller, and
more robust code base for gloo. There will be virtually no change for the
user.

