How to Use in Experiments

We now want to use the colors we defined when calibrating our booth (See How to Calibrate the Booth).

We use psychopy to present our stimuli. Of course, there might be other choices. But all the monitor measurements of achrolab are based on psychopy or more precisely on psychopy.visual.GratingStim.

First, you might want to tell python where it can find the package achrolab.

>>> import sys
>>> sys.path.append("<YOURPATH>/achrolabutils/achrolab")

Second, import visual from psychopy.

>>> from psychopy import visual

Then, you want to import your calibrated and saved colors.

>>> from colortable import ColorTable

Next, we need a tubes object, so we can make adjustments to the tubes.

>>> from tubes import Tubes
>>> tub = Tubes()

Then, we actually load the color table with our stored configurations.

>>> color_table = ColorTable("./calibdata/color_table_20110204_1108.pkl")

We select a certain illumination for our experiment. These illuminations are usually high since we always want the illumination of the booth to be a lot higher than the stimuli we present. We want to present stimuli in an illuminated room so they appear to be surface colors. If we wanted them to appear self-luminant we would present them in a completely dark room.

We can load a certain color entry from our color table and then define the background of our monitor and set the tubes accordingly. The background variable can be given to psychopy.visual.GratingStim.

>>> color_entry = color_table.color_list[165]
>>> bg = color_entry.grating_stim_value
>>> tubes.setVoltages(color_entry.voltages)

Then we choose the colors for our stimuli, for example 10 stimuli.

>>> col_exp = [x.grating_stim_value for x in color_table.color_list[99:109]]