Today, Google released the long awaited (and rumored) "Google Virtual World": Lively. Lively can be described best as a kind of IMVU in a web page. You can create yourself an avatar and can create and decorate your "room" (which does not have to be a "room" but can be an outdoor scene, too), where you meet with other avatars. The avatars kind of look like a cross breed of THERE and IMVU avatars and the visual quality is rather good. A plugin is needed, to integrate your room into a web page (which is only available for the Windows platform).
And of course, the web is already overflowing with head lines saying "The Second Life Killer is finally here!"
Hmmm...
While you ALWAYS have to take Google's project seriously ... is hard to see a Second Life "Killer" here.
Lively reminds me of IMVU, Vivaty and the early Kaneva. It is not a virtual "world" but a network of loosely connected scenes. This is a quite popular model for many platforms calling themselves "virtual worlds", which appeared on the market in the last 3 years. I am uncertain, if this model will be too successful in the long run. Many of the projects, which were based on "rooms" alone in the past, have added additional spatial constructs lately. For many applications besides "hey, look at my cool appartment" and "let's spend the night (an hour) together" a room or scene is a very limited surrounding.
This does not mean, that this could not reach a huge target audience. But the competition is already there. And some of the products already on the market do not look too bad. Vivaty, which has a very similar approach (as far as one can judge it now), has the big advantage of being tightly integrated with Facebook and AIM. I consider this a very valuable feature for this type of platform - because, the way Lively is now, it is basically a nice add on for a profile page on Facebook, MySpace or a blog. And for this purpose, a good integration with Facebook, MySpace or a blogging platform is important. Google certainly has these platforms available and the technological abilities to add such an integration.
Lets see what happens in the next months.
Technorati Tags: 3d web, google, googlewatching, metaverse, lively, second life, twinity, virtual worlds, web 3.d
Eventhough the approach in general it looks like creating a guest book or chat room on my website (which doesn't seem to be interesting to me), I see one positive aspect.
One disadvantage of virtual worlds like SL is, that you have to dive deep into the world. Launch the software and play in this virtual world.
But the media usage looks different to me. I do have live streaming italian radio on one tab, the next is my blog, next is twitter, one for you tube and some other for things I wanted to read. Additionally Skype or Google talk. The list can be extended, but I think you see where I'm heading too.
Livley allows to do multiple tasks meanwhile. It doesn't suck up all my attention and besides it doesn't affect my computers performance in the same way.
Posted by: André Wegner | July 09, 2008 at 06:23 AM
I think Lively could work out as a perfect tool to create "Kopräsenz" on websites and to make it experiencable. Guestbooks, comments etc. are heading for the same direction, but they are not realtime! And so they miss the whole immersion thing.
Of course this would only work on webpages who have enough visitors. But i guess something like Lively integrated in a site could help to make the visitors stay for a little bit longer.
Imagine a forum with a 3d-Chatroom in one corner or a commercial website with one for shopping advice or support or something.
The advantage of a Livelylike technology is, as far as i can see, the easy usage. No complicated viewer is required, you get realtime 3d-chatting with some immersion and you can put it everywhere.
Posted by: Paul Gebelein | July 11, 2008 at 03:28 AM
Paul, I agree.
Lively can act as a ready-to-use extra room for your website, be it a physical representation of a sitemap, a showroom or a meeting area. And it has never been as easy to append a human-assisted customer support avatar to a Web presence. Just copy and paste an iframe!
Check out mine at http://www.felgner.ch/2008/07/lively.html - set up in 1 hour ...
Posted by: Harald Felgner | July 15, 2008 at 02:52 AM