Simplifying Computer Art in Python

Processing is a programming language originally developed by the MIT media lab with the goal of allowing artists, educators, and many others develop striking computer generated or assisted projects without requiring deep knowledge of software engineering or computer graphics. Like Processing, Python has become a favourite language of users from diverse backgrounds, such as web development, education, and science. Unlike Processing, python lacks a simple and easy to use library for drawing shapes. Python’s existing libraries for scientific computing and data analysis could be made even more awesome when combined with a simple drawing library.

VPython contains a module called visual that established a simple API and convention for drawing shapes, however it was written in C++, prior to the development of pyglet, and thus is not entirely cross-platform. In this talk, I will demonstrate my solution to this problem: a re-implementation of visual purely in Python called PygletHelper. Pyglet, an existing python library, provides a python interface to OpenGL. PygletHelper is built on pyglet but obscures all of the OpenGL calls, such that the user can draw simple geometric shapes to the screen and animate them without needing to know about computer graphics terminology, memory usage, or C data types.

I will also show some need visualizations of science and music in my talk, as well as the graphical glitches encountered implementing the library.