Skandha4 and Slisp

Notice

Although we continue to use Skandha4 for a few demos, it is no longer under active development. Its functionality has been superseded by various other projects, especially MindSeer, a 3D Visualization tool written in Java.

Demos

Skandha4 was used to develop a number of SIG projects, including the Brain Visualizer and the Dynamic Scene Generator.

Overview

Skandha4 is "an emacs for 3D graphics"-- a portable shaded-polygon graphics extension to the Slisp toolkit which provides a variety of pre-built facilities on which specialized graphics applications may be quickly built. These facilities include a flexible relational datastructure for geometry which may be easily extended to add application-specific information, a pointwise arithmetic sublanguage over these relations, picking and animation support, a (truly!) 3D widget library, and a growing collection of primitives for such things as voxel and image processing.

If you're new to the Skandha world, it's easy to confuse four related programs (Skandha4, Skandha3, Slisp, and Xlisp). Here's how they relate:

Skandha4 is the 3D graphics extension of...
Slisp, a hybrid C/Lisp programming environment, which extends...
Xlisp, a small Lisp interpreter written in portable C by David Betz.
Skandha3 is a separate program for reconstructing and visualizing 3D organs from serial sections. (Skandha4 can emulate much of Skandha3's functionality, but not its reconstruction features.)

Around the lab, if someone refers to "Skandha" (with no number), they generally mean Skandha4.

Status Report

Skandha4's graphics functionality was originally developed using GL on Silicon Graphics hardware. In 1999, Jeff made some major revisions, adding Open GL drivers so that the program could be compiled and run under Linux.

Credits

Skandha4 was developed primarily by Jeff Prothero, based on David Betz's Xlisp. Additional development has been done by Andrew Poliakov, Kevin Hinshaw, Ben Wong, and Jim Brinkley.

Downloads

Check the Skandha4 downloads page.

Publications

J. F. Brinkley and J. S. Prothero, "Slisp: A flexible software toolkit for hybrid, embedded and distributed applications," Software -- Practice and Experience, vol. 27, pp. 33-48, 1997.

J. S. Prothero, "Skandha4: An Slisp-based Interactive Raster Graphics Toolkit," technical report draft, 1995. [web page]