Globally, an estimated 43 million people are blind, with limited treatment options available for many causes of vision loss. For certain conditions, visual neuroprostheses - such as retinal and cortical implants - may be the only viable intervention.
However, understanding the perceptual experience generated by these devices remains a significant challenge. The artificial vision they provide is shaped by complex interactions between neural stimulation, underlying neurophysiology, and device-specific parameters.
pulse2percept (p2p) is an open-source Python package that offers spatiotemporal models of common retinal and cortical implants, providing a computational framework to simulate and study artificial vision.
(left: input stimulus, right: predicted percept)
Simulations such as the above are likely to be critical for providing realistic estimates of prosthetic vision, thus providing regulatory bodies with guidance into what sort of visual tests are appropriate for evaluating prosthetic performance, and improving current and future technology.
If you use p2p in a scholarly publication, please cite as:
M Beyeler, GM Boynton, I Fine, A Rokem (2017). pulse2percept: A Python-based simulation framework for bionic vision. Proceedings of the 16th Python in Science Conference (SciPy), p.81-88, doi:10.25080/shinma-7f4c6e7-00c.
Once you have Python 3.9 or later (but not yet 3.13), you can install the
stable release of p2p using pip:
pip install pulse2perceptWe provide prebuilt wheels for recent versions of macOS (e.g., macOS 14), Linux (e.g., Ubuntu 24.04 LTS), and Windows (e.g., Windows Server 2022). You can find the full documentation here.
While other platforms are not explicitly supported, you may still be able to run
p2p with minimal modifications. If pip does not find a prebuilt wheel for
your system, it will attempt to install from source.
Note
Building from source requires NumPy and Cython. On Windows, this includes Visual Studio Build Tools.
Supported Python versions:
| Python | 3.12 | 3.11 | 3.10 | 3.9 | 3.8 | 3.7 | 3.6 | 3.5 | 3.4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| p2p 0.9 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||
| p2p 0.8 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||
| p2p 0.7 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||
| p2p 0.6 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||
| p2p 0.5 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Our GitHub Action Runners ensure that p2p works as expected on macOS 14 Arm64, Ubuntu 24.04, and Windows Server 2022.
To upgrade p2p to the latest stable version:
pip install -U pulse2perceptTo uninstall:
pip uninstall pulse2percept -yIf you want to install the latest development version from source, first ensure that you have NumPy and Cython installed. On Windows, you will also need Visual Studio Build Tools. Then run:
pip install git+https://github.com/pulse2percept/pulse2perceptFor more details, see our Installation Guide.
If you encounter issues, check our Issue Tracker on GitHub for solutions or contribute fixes for unsupported platforms.
- Have a look at some code examples from our Example Gallery.
- Familiarize yourself with visual implants, electrical stimuli, and our computational models.
- Check the FAQ to see if your question has already been answered.
- Request features or report bugs in our on GitHub.
