OpenViBE forum

The OpenViBE development team is pleased to announce a new release of the software.

Version 0.18.0 can be obtained from the downloads page.

Note that this is the last version where we support Windows XP and Visual Studio 2008.

Release highlights

- Lots of usability improvements to Designer, including rendering speed
- Multiclass classification support with three pairing strategies, native, 1-vs-all and 1-vs-1.
- Advanced P300 'CoAdapt' speller with new keyboard, new flashing strategies, improved timing, optional word prediction, and more
- Improved signal display, all signals can now be drawn to the same drawing area as is usually done with EEG data
- Support to allow box parameters to be changed during play (for boxes that explicitly declare it)
- New drivers: BioSemi ActiveTwo, Cognionics, TMSi (universal driver), NeuroElectrics Enobio3G

Many thanks to the contributors to this release

- Inria ADT OpenViBE NT teams: ATHENA (Sophia-Antipolis), Hybrid (Rennes), NEUROSYS (Nancy) and POTIOC (Bordeaux)
- Mensia Technologies
- Cognionics
- NeuroElectrics
- Anton Andreev & Gipsa Lab
- Jonathan Mercier-Ganady

The full changelog can be seen in the following post.


On behalf of the OpenViBE development team,
Jussi T. Lindgren, PhD
Lead Engineer @ ADT OpenViBE NT
Inria / France

v0.18.0 detailed changes

New features

*** Designer
- Loop button to allow automatic replaying of the scenario after it stops
- Zoom button allowing to zoom in and out of scenarios
- Allow scrolling the scenario canvas with arrow keys if the canvas has focus
- Remembers more GUI parameters for the next launch: active tab, loglevel, vertical divider, ...
- Improved GUI responsivity with large scenarios
- Allow alt-tabbing between Designer and visualisation widgets
- Log window can now be searched (filtered), case-sensitive
- Boxes with lots of parameters will now get a vertical scrollbar to the configuration window
- ${Path_ScenarioDirectory) (used to be ${__volatile_ScenarioDir}) is now expanded for script params allowing edit
- Tooltips no longer stay in front with alt-tab
- Visualization windows can now be closed and re-opened during scenario playback
- If a log entry comes from a box, the entry can now be clicked to highlight the box in the scenario
- Config file, kernel and random seed can now be specified from the command line
- Scenarios that are playing now get a little symbol in the tab
- Scenario tabs can now be reordered
- Unavailable buttons are now disabled when a scenario is locked
- F5 to F8 keyboard shortcuts now work regardless what has focus

*** Server
- New drivers: BioSemi ActiveTwo, Cognionics, TMSi (universal driver) (, NeuroElectrics Enobio3G)
- GTec Mobilab+ driver now also works on Windows (but disabled if GUSBAmp is compiled)
- Channels can now be selected already in the server
- Config file and kernel can be specified from the command line
- Bipolar channel support for gUSBAmp Gipsa driver

*** Applications
- Advanced P300 speller from the CoAdapt project. The speller has new keyboard, new flashing strategies, improved timing, optional word prediction, and more

*** Kernel
- Boxes can now declare what input stream types they support, so Designer does not incompatible types in the config.
- Support for box parameters that are modifiable during the scenario playback (for boxes that explicitly declare it)

*** Boxes
- Classification box now supports multiclass with pairing strategies such as 1-vs-all and 1-vs-1.
- Improved signal display, all signals can now be drawn to the same drawing area as is usually done with EEG
- Modifiable temporal filter box allowing parameters to be changed during playback
- LabStreamingLayer (LSL) export box to stream out data to external applications
- Mouse tracking box, returns mouse coordinates
- Shared Memory Writer, allows writing to shared memory which external apps can use
- ERP ("Event-Related Potentials") plotting box
- BrainAmp file writer box (.vhdr/.eeg/.vmrk combo)
- New classifiers in Classifier Trainer / Processor : Probabilistic LDA and Probabilistic Shrinkage LDA
- Noise generator box. It generates random signals from uniform random distribution
- GDF reader box now also supports GDFs more recent than v1.25
- Epoch variance box

*** Tutorials
- Tutorial box & scenarios for 'modifiable settings', i.e. settings that can be changed during scenario playback
- Hello World tutorial script for the python box
- Example client application for TCP Writer box
- OpenViBE->VRPN and VRPN->OpenViBE tutorials are now included in the source tree
- Classification training box-tutorial for multiclass

*** Toolkit
- New, alternative XML component allowing tree-like parsing of the XML documents

*** Build
- Option to build Release with Debug symbols
- Visual Studio launch script will now try to launch a non-free version of VS if available

Notable bugfixes

- Fixed launching of external applications on Windows when both the scenario path and the application path have spaces in them
- Fixed compilation on Ubuntu 14.04 and Fedora 20
- Fixed crash in Downsampling box
- Fixed crash in xDawn spatial filter trainer
- Fixed CTRL-C handling, it should now kill Designer on both Linux and Windows
- Fixed acquisition client box crashing if muted
- Fixed motor imagery scenario acquisition not stopping automatically
- Fixed specifying alternative log path in openvibe.conf
- Fixes to Brain Products ActiChamp & VAmp drivers
- Fixed non-integer sampling intervals for BrainAmp file writer
- Fixed impedance check setting not working for TMSi Refa32B driver
- Fixed loading of channel names in Acquisition Server if some channels have empty names
- Fixed evaluation scenario in Motor Imagery CSP
- Fixed VAmp handling of the reference electrode data
- Fixed SSVEP Mind Shooter not using the intended CSP filters
- Fixed motor imagery CSP performance test to route the data more appropritely

Known issues

- Signal Display is slow if stimulations are plotted on high-frequency multi-channel signal
- OneVsOne classification behaves badly if subclassifiers do not return probabilities (LDA, SVM).
- Loading classifier trainer settings does not correctly restore the parameters if the load changes the number of parameters (e.g. classifier or pairing strategy type changes)
- It has not been tested throughly if classifiers saved with <= 0.17.1 are compatible with the new classifier processor box of 0.18. The old box has been kept for compatibility but will be deprecated in the next version. It is adviced to switch to the new box and retrain your classifiers.
- CoAdapt P300 cannot be built with Visual Studio 2008 as we have not provided the corresponding vs90 dependencies: glfw, presage, inpout32


Cheers,
Jussi

Concerning NeuroElectrics Enobio3G users, a Windows installer repackaging is available with an updated DLL of the Enobio3G driver:

--> Windows installer 0.18.0-1

The previous installer is still available here.

The only difference between the two is the updated Enobio dll. There is no source changes or recompilation done.


Happy hacking,
J.