Semaphora

Semaphora S.A. was a private company incorporated in Paris, France.
It designed, developed and deployed realtime 3D characters for the Internet.
The principal feature of these 3D characters was that they could move outside of the web page they were driven by, and interact with the user even after the browser was closed.
History
While the development of technologies used by Semaphora started in 1999, Semaphora S.A. was incorporated in Paris in February 2000 and quickly funded by private investors.
In April 2000, Semaphora released its first product Quixel, the first realtime interactive 3D character available on a web site. Entirely driven by javascript the first version of Quixel integrated naturally into complex web sites using a novel communication mechanism that would become an ancestor of Ajax.
Quixel was quickly adopted by major web sites in France, the first one being Club Med, followed by France Telecom.
After 8 months of development, Quixel also included advance profiling and dynamic scenario building features allowing web sites to increase their conversion rates.
Semaphora sold to another private company for an undisclosed amount in late 2001, and was then renamed Mediaphora because of copyright issues.
Technology
Quixel started as a lightweight 3D engine that was aimed at becoming a better alternative to Microsoft Agents.
Microsoft Agents required heavy weighted animations to be downloaded onto the computer to be played and offered little dynamism as all the animation sequences were pre-calculated. Quixel on the other hand rendered the character on the fly using Open GL, Direct 3D or even a software Z-Buffer 3D engine. All kinds of animations and customization were then possible, at different resolutions.
The first versions of Quixel developed in 1999 used motion capture which allowed fast production of custom sets of animations. However the team quickly stated that results were not satisfying and decided to develop an innovative animation system that could give life to any humanoid character applying inverse kinetics to a virtual skeleton. Animations were then altered or augmented depending on parameters set in the javascript which drove the character from the web page. Behavioral changes such as emotions could be driven by the script.
A driving module called Semagent (for Semaphora Agent) was interfaced with the browser (via an ActiveX for Internet Explorer or a Netscape plugin on other browsers) and made direct communication with the server possible by exposing a specialized API to javascript executed in the web page (akin to the HTTPXmlRequest API that is available in modern browsers).
This module coordinated the 3D engine, streamed audio from the server in the case of audio streaming or managed text-to-speech, and synchronized animations altogether with the javascript.

Competitors
* LivingActor, an interactive 3D Avatar by La Cantoche
* Microsoft Agent

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