VisPy: interactive scientific visualization in Python
-----------------------------------------------------

Main website: http://vispy.org

|Build Status| |Coverage Status| |Zenodo Link| |Contributor Covenant|

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VisPy is a **high-performance interactive 2D/3D data visualization
library**. VisPy leverages the computational power of modern **Graphics
Processing Units (GPUs)** through the **OpenGL** library to display very
large datasets. Applications of VisPy include:

-  High-quality interactive scientific plots with millions of points.
-  Direct visualization of real-time data.
-  Fast interactive visualization of 3D models (meshes, volume
   rendering).
-  OpenGL visualization demos.
-  Scientific GUIs with fast, scalable visualization widgets (`Qt <http://www.qt.io>`__ or
   `IPython notebook <http://ipython.org/notebook.html>`__ with WebGL).

Releases
--------

See `CHANGELOG.md <./CHANGELOG.md>`_.

Announcements
-------------

See the `VisPy Website <https://vispy.org/news.html>`_.

Using VisPy
-----------

VisPy is a young library under heavy development at this time. It
targets two categories of users:

1. **Users knowing OpenGL**, or willing to learn OpenGL, who want to
   create beautiful and fast interactive 2D/3D visualizations in Python
   as easily as possible.
2. **Scientists without any knowledge of OpenGL**, who are seeking a
   high-level, high-performance plotting toolkit.

If you're in the first category, you can already start using VisPy.
VisPy offers a Pythonic, NumPy-aware, user-friendly interface for OpenGL
ES 2.0 called **gloo**. You can focus on writing your GLSL code instead
of dealing with the complicated OpenGL API - VisPy takes care of that
automatically for you.

If you're in the second category, we're starting to build experimental
high-level plotting interfaces. Notably, VisPy now ships a very basic
and experimental OpenGL backend for matplotlib.


Installation
------------

Please follow the detailed
`installation instructions <http://vispy.org/installation.html>`_
on the VisPy website.

Structure of VisPy
------------------

Currently, the main subpackages are:

-  **app**: integrates an event system and offers a unified interface on
   top of many window backends (Qt4, wx, glfw, jupyter notebook,
   and others). Relatively stable API.
-  **gloo**: a Pythonic, object-oriented interface to OpenGL. Relatively
   stable API.
-  **scene**: this is the system underlying our upcoming high level
   visualization interfaces. Under heavy development and still
   experimental, it contains several modules.

   -  **Visuals** are graphical abstractions representing 2D shapes, 3D
      meshes, text, etc.
   -  **Transforms** implement 2D/3D transformations implemented on both
      CPU and GPU.
   -  **Shaders** implements a shader composition system for plumbing
      together snippets of GLSL code.
   -  The **scene graph** tracks all objects within a transformation
      graph.
-  **plot**: high-level plotting interfaces.

The API of all public interfaces are subject to change in the future,
although **app** and **gloo** are *relatively* stable at this point.

Code of Conduct
---------------

The VisPy community requires its members to abide by the
`Code of Conduct <./CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md>`_. In this CoC you will find the
expectations of members, the penalties for violating these expectations, and
how violations can be reported to the members of the community in charge of
enforcing this Code of Conduct.

Governance
----------

The VisPy project maintainers make decisions about the project based on a
simple consensus model. This is described in more detail on the
`governance page <https://vispy.org/governance/GOVERNANCE.html>`_ of the vispy
website as well as the
`list of maintainers <https://vispy.org/governance/MAINTAINERS.html>`_.

In addition to decisions about the VisPy project, there is also a steering
committee for the overall VisPy organization. More information about this
committee can also be found on the `steering committee page <https://vispy.org/org/STEERING-COMMITTEE.html>`_
of the vispy website,
along with the organization's `charter <https://vispy.org/org/CHARTER.html>`_ and
other related documents (linked in the charter).

Genesis
-------

VisPy began when four developers with their own visualization libraries
decided to team up:
`Luke Campagnola <http://luke.campagnola.me/>`__ with `PyQtGraph <http://www.pyqtgraph.org/>`__,
`Almar Klein <http://www.almarklein.org/>`__ with `Visvis <https://github.com/almarklein/visvis>`__,
`Cyrille Rossant <http://cyrille.rossant.net>`__ with `Galry <https://github.com/rossant/galry>`__,
`Nicolas Rougier <http://www.loria.fr/~rougier/index.html>`__ with `Glumpy <https://github.com/rougier/Glumpy>`__.

Now VisPy looks to build on the expertise of these developers and the
broader open-source community to build a high-performance OpenGL library.

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External links
--------------

-  `User mailing
   list <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/vispy>`__
-  `Dev mailing
   list <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/vispy-dev>`__
-  `Chat room <https://gitter.im/vispy/vispy>`__
-  `Developer chat room <https://gitter.im/vispy/vispy-dev>`__
-  `Wiki <http://github.com/vispy/vispy/wiki>`__
-  `Gallery <http://vispy.org/gallery.html>`__
-  `Documentation <http://vispy.readthedocs.org>`__

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