Let's try it

• you'll now just need the simple receptive field script and issue

  python SimpleReceptiveField.py 

• the demo consists of three panels: the input image, the input to the neuron, the output. the receptive field is defined by the first frame that is grabbed. Therefore after first use, I recommend to quit the program, draw a simple stimulus (a line on a paper, a grating, ...) and restart the program by holding the drawing close to the camera.

Conclusion

• It's easy to do! A simple installation setup, a short script is enough to demonstrate an essential neuroscience experiment. The simplicity of python is essential in leveraging the complexity of hooking together different pieces of hardware.

• There's yet no API for real-time neural simulations to my knowledge. Non von-Neumann architectures (that is algorithms using a different substrate than sequential computers) are becoming a possibility in the near future. Building such applications with real-time demo will enable to study neural models in a different way that the present 1) set-up 2) run 3) analyze workflow that is used in most neural simulators. Yet, this demo is over-simplistic and do not use the computational power of parallelism yet.

• more info @ SimpleCellDemo page