sionna-vispy

A VisPy backend to preview Sionna scenes that works both inside and outside Jupyter Notebook.

This library consists of two parts:

1. a VisPy-based InteractiveDisplay to replace sionna.rt.previewer;
2. and a patch() context manager that dynamically replaces the old pythreejs previewer with the new VisPy previewer.

Installation

For the best out-of-the-box experience, we recommend installing via Pip with recommended extras:

pip install sionna-vispy[recommended]

This will install this package, as well as PySide6 and jupyter-rfb, so that scene.preview(...) works inside and outside Jupyter Notebooks.

Alternatively, you can install sionna-vispy with:

pip install sionna-vispy

And later install your preferred VisPy backend(s).

Usage

The VisPy scene previewer works both inside and outside Jupyter Notebooks.

First, you need to import the package (import order does not matter):

import sionna_vispy

Next, the usage of patch depends on the environment, see the subsections.

Note

If with patch(): is called before any call to scene.preview(...), then you only need to call patch() once.

Inside Notebooks¹

Very simply, rewrite any

scene.preview(...)

with the following:

with sionna_vispy.patch():
    canvas = scene.preview()

canvas

Warning

canvas must be the return variable of the cell, because the with context does not return an instance of InteractiveDisplay.

Outside Notebooks

Canvas need to be shown and the VisPy application must be started to open a window:

with sionna_vispy.patch():
    canvas = scene.preview(...)

canvas.show()
canvas.app.run()

How it works

This package replaces the pythreejs previewer with some VisPy implementation by monkey-patching sionna.rt.scene.InteractiveDisplay.

Additionally, patch() will (by default) look at any existing sionna.rt.scene.Scene class instance in the local namespace of the callee, and temporarily replace any existing preview widget to make sure to use the new previewer. You can opt-out of this by calling patch(patch_existing=False) instead.

Design goals

This package aims to be a very minimal replacement to the pythreejs previewer, with maximum compatibility.

As a result, it does not aim to provide any additional feature.

Instead, it aims at providing a very similar look to that of pythreejs, with all the nice features that come with VisPy.

Contributing

This project welcomes any contribution, and especially:

• bug fixes;
• graphical improvements to closely match the original pythreejs previewers;
• or documentation typos.

As stated above, new features are not expected to be added, unless they are also added to the original pythreejs previewer.

Footnotes

1. Note that you need jupyter_rfb to work inside Jupyter Notebooks. ↩