"There's a lot of different ways we do it, depending on the character. Typically we'll have a puppeteer, sometimes two, working along with the performance animator. Those puppeteers might handle everything from eyebrows to eyeballs to mouth twitches, depending on the character. There is a way we're experimenting with in terms of face-tracking where we can pick some of that up, but that's still a technology that's coming along, though people are getting close on it.

"There are characters where just one person can do it, and there are no characters that require more than three. Usually it's two, a puppeteer and one other. Then we track it - it's digital recording so you can do one track with one character, then do another track with another character deposited over it - we can build multi-character episodic content with this very quickly. For many of the properties you see on DotComix.com we can do three to fifteen episodes a day. It's tremendously powerful. Only the writing's not scalable!"

Actually, getting into the vector streaming virtual 3D business is not a hopeless task, even without Protozoa's "Alive" software. That's because it's not the only software they use. Their CTO, Eric Gregory, was a bit more forthcoming on the technical end, starting with the story of how it was all developed:

"The core technology behind this is a system called Alive that we've been developing for the past ten years," he reiterated, "a live performance animation puppetry system. We've been using it to develop broadcast animation - we have children's shows being produced with that technology on four different continents. In the last couple of years we've been refining it and using the Web as an outlet as well, which was the genesis of DotComix.

"Six years ago when we founded Protozoa, Inc. we were the digital media department of Colossal Pictures, doing broadcast animation work at the height of the multi-media CD-ROM craze. We spun off to become a new company with some seed funding from Motorola. At that time the WWW was just becoming something people were aware of. That was my background. In the late '80s I was working on distributed vehicle simulation for the military --- tank simulators, flight simulators, it was all being done over IP networks at that time, a project called SIMNET, a DARPA-funded project to do real-time 3D graphics over IP networks. That was my first exposure to doing real-time 3D graphics over networks, and I've been doing it ever since.