That brought Protozoa's tale right up to the present - and to their involvement in other, more currently available, software:

"So we've just continued pushing it," Gregory continued. "We're still active in the standards groups that are still trying to put this together. Right now there are two main ones. One is X3D and the other is MPEG-4. The MPEG-4 committee is working on streaming 3D graphics for MPEG-4. I don't know when that will be done, and that's just a standard, not a working browser. The X3D consortium is the old VRML people trying to take another run at it. There's a number of companies with their plug-ins and browsers that are working on that. We contribute to all those, mostly with sample data, comments on the specifications, things like that.

"But in the meanwhile, because the Web became so popular, we felt we had to get something out there, and we've turned to a couple of proprietary solutions. The one we use today is something called Pulse Player, from Pulse Entertainment, which is a 3D plug-in to both Netscape and Explorer that allows someone to construct a Web page that has 3D content where you can interactively select components to be streamed to that player. You wait half a minute or so for the initial geometry to load, and then you push a play button which connects to a server and streams animation and audio data. Pulse is one of three or four proprietary solutions. There's Pulse, Shout 3D, Atomic3D, and Brilliant Digital. Their database format was similar enough to our internal Alive format that it was really a process of writing some data translators and converters, which allowed us to integrate our Alive authoring environment with the Pulse Player runtime environment. That's how we produce all the DotComix content. We author the characters in Alive, and we can play them out as live video in Alive, which is what we do with Duke, straight to broadcast. But we can take that raw data that constructs those characters and export them to the Pulse Player format and then record that animation and audio and have that streamed to the client player."

Well, we still wanted to get hold of a copy of Alive. Gregory was proprietary, but offered a ray of hope. Could we do it with those other authoring tools?