Vispy - a future tool for interactive visualization

Speaker: Almar Klein, Cybermind Interactive Nederland

Abstract:

The amount of data that is available has grown exponentially over the last few years. This demands visualization tools that can handle these large amount of data, and at the same time provide a way for the user to navigate the data interactively.

The goal of vispy is to create the foundations for the *next-generation* interactive visualization software in Python. This is, admittedly, a quite difficult and ambitious goal that could take years. This is one of the reasons why Vispy is split into several "layers", where the lowest layer represent a rather direct API to OpenGL, whereas the higher layers provide simpler and intuitive interfaces to perform a variety of visualization tasks.

Vispy uses OpenGL to leverage the power of the GPU. Custom shaders are used to create publication-quality graphics. We use the ES 2.0 implementation/subset of OpenGL, which enables us to create graphics in the browser and to target mobile devices.

In this talk we will talk about the core ideas of vispy as well as the structure of the package. We will demonstrate the current status and expand on the future and the things that are currently in development.