But nowadays operating systemĭependency can be an equal hindrance, despite all the claims to the contrary. This has changed quite a bit and hardwareĭependency is less of a problem today. Hardware, perhaps custom designed or not easily available.
When I started out, software was mostly tied to specific Hundreds of laboratories have set up powerfulįacilities. Story of software development – is one of continuously The story of software development for psychophysics – like any other There is a wealth of software and hardware out there to do the experiments.
When somebody starts anew, should one recommend a Unix base or a simple PC or Mac? Is there a certain package that isīest suited? It turns out there is no simple answer. When I started this overview, I had a simple question: How should we best do psychophysical experimenting – including simple things like measuring a contrast-sensitivity function or visual acuity? If you haven't by now, read the papers of Elze & Tanner (2009) on LCD monitor timing and (2010) on misspecifications of stimulus duration, and the CVNet discussions collected in the monitors section below (which is current as of 2016).
Did you keep a CRT in your storage room? You didn't (like I) because they were just too bulky and we were unpleasantly surprised by the limitations of current technology. Those were the times when monitors still did what the experimenter wanted them to do. – This is now nearly two decodes ago, and an up-to-date scholarly compilation is still not around. All papers are available online (pdf) through a subscribing library, some are available on authors' personal homepages.
The tables of contents are on the web they contain links to authors and pdf's provided by them. Use of computers and cathode-ray-tube displays in visual psychophysics, The status of 1997 was captured in two special issues of the journal One development is new, however, and that is the ubiquity of mobile devices. Overview – by the regularity of updates one can easily assess whether a system has Many packages have been steadily supported and improved, and find more Integration, however, as is perhaps evidenced by cross links between the entriesīelow. The three communities, still live happily in parallel, mostly unaffectedīy the boring developments in the other. The increased power of hardware the notion of special Unix workstations hasĭisappeared in the 90s and has been replaced by public-domain Unix derivatives like Linux, Debian, Ubuntu etc. But the general picture has not changed all that much – the three main platforms are still the PC, the Macintosh, and Unix variants. Since I first compiled and sent the overview to a few colleagues in July 1994 (first posted on CVNet May 1995) there were uncountable revisions. This is an overview on what is available. How well do we see? How can visual function be described and which mechanisms can be thought to underly? Visual psychophysics tries to give answers to these general questions, and research in this area needs specialised software.