VISPY, A Modern and Interactive Scientific Visualisation

Whereas the availability of data increases exponentially fast, the current visualization tools available today in Python do not scale gracefully to big data. The major plotting library in Python is Matplotlib and is more focused on the generation of static publication-ready figures than interactive visualization. These are really two different, and nearly orthogonal goals. For the former, high display quality is the major objective, whereas speed and reactivity is much more important for the latter. Matplotlib can be used for interactive visualization, but it has not been primarily designed for this. Consequently, the frame rate tends to be low on medium-size data sets, and million-points data sets can not be decently visualized in this way. Our goal is thus to create the foundations for the next-generation interactive visualization software in Python.