Psycho
The psycho back-end is built on top of PsychoPy, a library that has been designed specifically for creating psychological experiments. It is hardware accelerated and provides high level routines for creating complex visual stimuli (drifting gratings, etc.). If you care about timing and plan on creating complex stimuli, Psycho is a good choice.
Overview
Using PsychoPy directly
You can find extensive documentation on PsychoPy at http://www.psychopy.org/. When using PsychoPy in OpenSesame, it is important to know that the main window can be accessed as self.experiment.window or simply win. So the following code snippet draws a Gabor patch:
from psychopy import visual
gabor = visual.PatchStim(win, tex="sin", size=256, mask="gauss", sf=0.05, ori=45)
gabor.draw()
win.flip()
An example experiment that uses PsychoPy can be found here: tilt_adaptation_psychopy.opensesame
Tutorials
A tutorial specifically for using PsychoPy from within OpenSesame:
And a more general PsychoPy tutorial:
Citation
Although PsychoPy is bundled with the binary distributions of OpenSesame, it is a separate project. When appropriate, please cite the following papers in addition to citing OpenSesame:
Peirce, J. W. (2007). PsychoPy: Psychophysics software in Python. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 162(1-2), 8-13. doi:10.1016/j.jneumeth.2006.11.017
Peirce, J. W. (2009). Generating stimuli for neuroscience using PsychoPy. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 2(10). doi:10.3389/neuro.11.010.2008
