"When the Web started becoming real, it became obvious to us that it was the next thing for our technology: instead of point-to-point, to get it out there on the Web where people could watch it. We became very involved in anything headed that direction. The first notable one was VRML (virtual reality modeling language). We were big contributors and supporters in the VRML 1.0 effort, which was based on inventor technology from Silicon Graphics, which is what our Alive system is based on. We did a lot of early work in short-form animation in VRML 1 format. That was the very first 3D graphics format for the Web. VRML 1.0 had two major shortcomings. One was that everything, particularly browsers, was so new that plug-ins just did not work well, which prevented it from getting any kind of distribution at all. The second was that the standard lacked streaming capability, which we deemed critical. To us, you could not have a successful animation standard without it. We found ways of shoehorning in some canned animation, but it wasn't streamed - you had to download the whole thing. Then VRML 2 came out with broader distribution because the platforms had stabilized a bit - by that time you just had two browsers, plug-ins became more reliable, and more people got to view these animations. But it was still a small audience, very technical people with very fast computers and faster Internet connections. At that time we were talking about a twenty to thirty second animation that required a two minute download to see it - still not exactly fun.

"But at that time we were actually successful in stimulating a lot of interest in streaming animation with the two VRML-browser developers. We had formed a close relationship with both InterVista and Cosmo Software. Cosmo Software was bought by Netscape and they were the 3D browser plug-in for Netscape, and InterVista was the plug-in used by Microsoft. We worked closely with both groups to start prototyping and developing streaming media extensions to VRML players to get streaming animation capability and we actually went as far as having working browser versions with both companies, but unfortunately because of the politics of browsers, both Netscape and Microsoft did not release those features in their broad-distribution browsers, so then again VRML 2 never got the ubiquity that Real or Flash players have now because they're being bundled with the browsers. But it was a good technical feasibility study, because we saw that it worked well. We knew we could stream animations over 28k modems and it worked."