This is an example of a possible application to solid state teaching of the interface between JAVA and VRML 2.0. Our original goal was to create a real 3-d crystal by putting atoms at the places indicated by displacing a set of unit vectors and that did not exceed a maximum distance from the center of coordinates. However we have been limited to the number of atoms that can be placed in the VRML world. At this moment we are showing 125, this does not seem to be enough to obtain the desired goal, which is to see independence of the shape of the resulting crystal from the unit cell chosen. The limitation is really a time limitation. In our machine, a 486 running at 50 Mhz, it takes about 5 minutes to load the page, most of the time is taken by VRML and JAVA to generate the 125 atoms. Please if you run this on a faster machine let us know if there is an improvement.
The unit cell is represented by three vectors, each has three cartesian coordinates which can be changed by the user. The three vectors are U(U1,U2,U3), V(V1,V2,V3), W(W1,W2,W3).
To see the effect of the changes press the button "Replot."