What are these basic tasks you speak of? So, as a professional web designer, I'm supposed to assume my University's site licenses for Photoshop and Illustrator are useless, soon to be replaced with...what? Fireworks and Freehand suddenly becoming the standardbearers? Yeah, some time around the time GoLive supplants Dreamweaver and Acrobat disappears from the market.

I do, however, completely agree with you about avatar technology: it's like the swine flu vaccine, a cure in search of a disease. It isn't insanely great, doesn't add value to online commerce, and until it's viable without new plugins, belongs back where it came from, first person shooter games. Virtual art galleries sacrifice every advantage of traditional computer image browsing (speed, detail), so that isn't much of an incentive. Bottom line: if porno sites won't touch a new technology, it isn't useful -- yet.

kupa, I know you don't want to hear that, and it must be exciting to partner with Adobe, but I'd MUCH rather see this avatar tech used in interactive web applets (talking spokespeople a la Ananova) where a low bandwidth and small memory footprint is an actual benefit. For example, an applet that could play back short, simplified .PZ2 files on the server and cache some basic facial movements would be useful, secure, and provide Poser users working on enterprise solutions virtually no learning curve.

Remember, archived Java applets can be cached on both Mac and Windows browsers, so repeat users won't have a wait time for the basic engine to load. Look at Yahoo! GeoCities' PageBuilder applet for proof of this.

[BTW, ronstuff, the Microsoft 'agent' technology you speak of doesn't actually do 3D. What you're looking at is a series of canned animated bitmaps tied to behaviors, demonstrated by the 2D 'dog' Office Assistant (all the Assistants are instances of Agent tech). It doesn't matter to the API where the images come from.]