Screen('OpenWindow')

Psychtoolbox › Screen.{mex*,dll} subfunction

Open an onscreen window. Specify a screen by a windowPtr or a screenNumber (0 is
the main screen, with menu bar). "color" is the clut index (scalar or [r g b]
triplet) that you want to poke into each pixel; default is white. If supplied,
"rect" must contain at least one pixel. If a windowPtr is supplied then "rect"
is in the window's coordinates (origin at upper left), and defaults to the whole
window. If a screenNumber is supplied then "rect" is in screen coordinates
(origin at upper left), and defaults to the whole screen. (In all cases,
subsequent references to this new window will use its coordinates: origin at its
upper left.). Please note that while providing a "rect" parameter to open a
normal window instead of a fullscreen window is convenient for debugging, but
drawing performance, stimulus onset timing and onset timestamping may be
impaired, so be careful.
"pixelSize" sets the depth (in bits) of each pixel; default is to leave depth
unchanged. "numberOfBuffers" is the number of buffers to use. Setting anything
else than 2 will be useful for development/debugging of PTB itself but will mess
up any real experiment. "stereomode" Type of stereo display algorithm to use: 0
(default) means: Monoscopic viewing. 1 means: Stereo output via OpenGL on any
stereo hardware that is supported by MacOS-X, e.g., the shutter glasses from
CrystalView. 2 means: Left view compressed into top half, right view into bottom
half. 3 means left view compressed into bottom half, right view compressed into
top half. 4 and 5 allow split screen display where left view is shown in left
half, right view is shown in right half or the display. A value of 5 does the
opposite (cross-fusion). Values of 6,7,8 and 9 enable Anaglyph stereo rendering
of types left=Red, right=Green, vice versa and left=Red, right=Blue and vice
versa. A value of 10 enables multi-window stereo: Open one window for left eye
view, one for right eye view, treat both of them as one single stereo window. A
value of 11 enables our own frame-sequential stereo mode. See StereoDemo.m for
examples of usage of the different stereo modes. See ImagingStereoDemo.m for
more advanced usage on modern hardware.
"multisample" This parameter, if provided and set to a value greater than zero,
enables automatic hardware anti-aliasing of the display: For each pixel,
'multisample' color samples are computed and combined into a single output pixel
color. Higher numbers provide better quality but consume more video memory and
lead to a reduction in framerate due to the higher computational demand. The
maximum number of samples is hardware dependent. Psychtoolbox will silently
clamp the number to the maximum supported by your hardware if you ask for too
much. On very old hardware, the value will be ignored. Read 'help AntiAliasing'
for more in-depth information about multi-sampling. "imagingmode" This optional
parameter enables PTB's internal image processing pipeline. The pipeline is off
by default. Read 'help PsychImaging' for information about typical use and
benefits of this feature.
"specialFlags" This optional parameter enables some special window behaviours if
the sum of certain flags is passed. A currently supported flag is the symbolic
constant kPsychGUIWindow. It enables windows to behave more like regular GUI
windows on your system. See 'help kPsychGUIWindow' for more info.
"clientRect" This optional parameter allows to define a size of the onscreen
windows drawing area that is different from the actual size of the windows
framebuffer. If set, then the imaging pipeline is started and a virtual
framebuffer of the size of "clientRect" is created. Your code will draw into
that framebuffer. At display time, the content of this virtual framebuffer will
get scaled to the size of the true onscreen window, a process known as
panel-scaling or panel-fitting. This allows to decouple the size of a stimulus
as drawn by your code from the actual resolution of the display device. The
feature is mostly useful if you need to run the same presentation code on
different setups with different native resolutions. See the 'help PsychImaging'
section about 'UsePanelFitter' for more info.

Opening or closing a window takes about one to three seconds, depending on type
of connected display. COMPATIBILITY TO OS-9 PTB: If you absolutely need to run
old code for the old MacOS-9 or Windows Psychtoolbox, you can switch into a
compatibility mode by adding the command Screen('Preference', 'EmulateOldPTB',

1. at the very top of your script. This will restore Offscreen windows and
   WaitBlanking functionality, but at the same time disable most of the new
   features of the OpenGL Psychtoolbox. Please do not write new experiment code in
   the old style! Emulation mode is pretty new and may contain significant bugs, so
   use with great caution!

###See also: OpenOffscreenWindow, SelectStereoDrawBuffer, PanelFitter, Close, CloseAll