DESIGN:

VNET -Technical

The Panopticon is built around the VNet multi-user VR system, written by Stephen White and Jeff Sonstein using only the open standards of VRML 2.0 and Java.

All you need to connect to a VNet multiuser environment is a VRML 2.0-compliant browser, ie a browser equipped with a VRML savvy plugin. MAc users using the Cosmo Beta 2 plugin will need to download the Cosmoplugin.jar (36k zip) file to enable the Java multiuser chat applet to function. This was not included in the Cosmo Player install file. Place it in your plugin folder.

Newer versions of Netscape need an alias of the Cosmo Plugin to be placed in the Netscape plugins folder. The plugin is automatically installed in the Cosmo folder (in the extensions folder inside the Syatem folder), but an alias needs to be manually placed inside Netscapes Plugin folder.

VNet is free software, released under the GNU General Public License (VNet is not GNU software; it just has the same license). This means that you can download and modify the VNet source code, as long as you provide your changes back to the VNet community. Any derivative works based on VNet must also be released under the GPL with source code.

No modifications have been made to the VNET code for the Panopticon environments. The Panopticon is running from an Apple Macintosh Blue G3 server using Mac OSX and the Apache file server. Previously it was running under Mac OS 8.6 running WebStar.