Well that tells Duke's story in a nutshell, but to rephrase the question: how did they do it, technically? Through their "Alive" technology, Danielson explained:

"We have a completely proprietary system. That's the front end, the authoring part, and into that authoring part we can plug in a lot of the more classic 3D or 2D animation tools. Then we go out to some form of player, anything from QuickTime to the 3D player we use currently, and we write an API in order to get to whatever the player is. We're player-agnostic and we'll use the right player for the right property, or for the right business deal. The Duke thing for example is being done and distributed in QuickTime only, because our friends at Apple were kind enough to step up and put a very large sponsorship package on the table. We're happy to work with them and they've been great partners."

Gee, Damon, can we get some to take home? How do we get hold of your software? Alas, it appears we may already have missed the boat:

"There's a great difference between creating a company and a structure that can support technology sales and licensing," he explained, "and in fact this company at one point did do that and they were very interested in licensing their technology on the authoring side in pre-Web days. But once we did the work needed to get this applied to creating animation on the Web, it didn't really make sense to build an organization that could support the licensing sales. And quite frankly, right now we think we've got a hell of an advantage, and we'd like to keep it."

Bummer. So at least tell us how it works.

"Its rendered in real time," Danielson explained. "What we do first is create a digital puppet and then we create the mathematics that are the strings to the puppet. We have a whole set of behaviors that are off the shelf, which you can apply in certain ways or mix anything from an eyebrow to a foot twitch. Then we wire a person up into a suit and when that person moves, the digital puppet moves.