Unfortunately, current browsers are not set up "out-of-the-box" to display java3D applets. However, Netscape (3.0+) and Internet Explorer (4.0+) can be set up to work with these applets by use of a publically available and free plug-in mechanism (see general discussion on plug-ins from Netscape and from Microsoft- other browsers may also be capable, but I haven't much information on this).
Before you can use the eclipse viewer, you must be sure that the following has been done:
Warning: these downloads total about 8-10 megabytes. Both of these steps are usually straightforward, but the installations can be tempermental and you may have to do some experimenting to get things to work on your particular set-up.
To display the applet, almost any graphics hardware equal to or better than 800x600 resolution SVGA will work,
but you will get very much better
results with a good graphics accelerator card. On my 133MHz laptop, I get about one frame per second. On my
450 MHz workstation with a Diamond Viper video card I get about 80 frames per second. There
is a discussion on hardware for java 3D at the java 3D Community site www.j3d.org.
Installing the Plug-in
The java 1.2 plug-in is at Sun's java plug-in site. If you go
to the eclipse viewer page and you do not have
the plug-in loaded, you will be prompted how to obtain it. But after that, you still must complete the extensions
step before the page will display properly.