Proceedings of the Fourth PHANTOM Users Group Workshop

This Report contains the proceedings of the Fourth Phantom Users Group Workshop contains 17 papers presented October 9-12, 1999 at MIT Endicott House in Dedham Massachusetts. The workshop included sessions on, Tools for Programmers, Dynamic Environments, Perception and Cognition, Haptic Connections, Collision Detection / Collision Response, Medical and Seismic Applications, and Haptics Going Mainstream. The proceedings include papers that cover a variety of subjects in computer haptics including rendering, contact determination, development libraries, and applications in medicine, path planning, data interaction and training.

New Architectural Models for Visibly Controllable Computing: The Relevance of Dynamic Object Oriented Architectures and Plan Based Computing Models

Traditionally, we've focussed on the question of how to make a system easy to code the first time, or perhaps on how to ease the system's continued evolution. But if we look at life cycle costs, then we must conclude that the important question is how to make a system easy to operate. To do this we need to make it easy for the operators to see what's going on and to then manipulate the system so that it does what it is supposed to. This is a radically different criterion for success. What makes a computer system visible and controllable? This is a difficult question, but it's clear that today's modern operating systems with nearly 50 million source lines of code are neither. Strikingly, the MIT Lisp Machine and its commercial successors provided almost the same functionality as today's mainstream sytsems, but with only 1 Million lines of code. This paper is a retrospective examination of the features of the Lisp Machine hardware and software system. Our key claim is that by building the Object Abstraction into the lowest tiers of the system, great synergy and clarity were obtained. It is our hope that this is a lesson that can impact tomorrow's designs. We also speculate on how the spirit of the Lisp Machine could be extended to include a comprehensive access control model and how new layers of abstraction could further enrich this model.