Terminally hip: Google’s new virtual-world software, Lively, lets users create custom-furnished 3-D chat rooms that can be embedded in ordinary Web pages.
Google
The search giant's Lively software appears to be aimed at novice users.
Last week, Google released Lively, its own system for building virtual online environments. Unlike recent forays into virtual worlds by IBM and Sun, which concentrated on the technology's business potential, Lively seems to be aimed at the consumer market. It also has a number of features that may make it more attractive to first-time users than popular virtual worlds like Second Life. Nonetheless, some industry insiders question whether Google approached Lively as a business initiative or just one interesting project among many.
Sibley Verbeck, CEO of the Electric Sheep Company, a virtual-world service and software provider, welcomes the credibility that the Google brand brings to the industry: "There is no question [that Lively] is a very positive thing. Whenever a major, innovative company makes some kind of bet, it gives validity to the industry." But, he adds, "from my perspective with experience inside the industry, I do not see any evidence that it was built based on use cases. When I look at the feature set for what is needed by any virtual world, it is missing features."
That type of response may not be surprising considering Lively's origins. It was originally one of Google's "20 percent" projects: the company's engineers spend one day a week on projects that interest them, unrelated to their day jobs. But in an e-mail, Niniane Wang, an engineering manager at Google who chartered and led Lively's development, says, "I would like to set the record straight that this started out as a 20 percent project but turned into a full-time project, with a dedicated team that put in a lot of hard work."
Unlike Second Life, Lively is not a continuous virtual environment in which users can acquire land and property. Rather, it's a system for building customized virtual rooms that other users' avatars can visit. But again unlike Second Life, it doesn't require the user to launch a separate application in order to enter a virtual space. Links to rooms can be embedded in ordinary Web pages; clicking the link will launch the Lively plug-in inside a browser window (or prompt the user to install it, if he or she hasn't already done so). Within a Lively room, you can add picture frames that display images from the Web, and Google provides tools for integrating content from other sites that it owns, such as the Picasa photo-sharing site and YouTube.
Another feature that seems aimed at users unfamiliar with virtual worlds is Lively's navigation system: you just drag your avatar around with your mouse. But while the system may be easier to learn to use, it's less versatile than the keyboard shortcuts common to video games and most other virtual worlds.
Linden Lab is working on making it easier to import data from the Web into Second Life.
Technology companies are building virtual headquarters in the video game Second Life to win customers and keep employees happy.
RiversRunRed and Millions-of-Us think their exclusive contracts to make content for the google virtual world is a good idea. Well knock me over with a virtual feather.
Don't Get me wrong, both companies do a great job at developing large detailed builds for SecondLife and may be the right answer for developing the first wave of content. However the real creativity that comes from virtual worlds is the independantly created user content.
As far as, "not to mention the questionable material that users put forth that led to a tarnished image for Second Life.", please. If google is that worried, create sandboxes for content creation, and put an aproval process in place before the content is alowed in world.
There.com never moved forward because they kept the users out of the loop of content creation, don't make the same mistake Google.
The economy of user-generated content: not understood?
The Virtual World '08 conference in April, if anything, told everybody to quit contiguous, immersive virtual worlds with solid economies supported by user-generated content — and tell everybody to start developing Flash-based games for kids, adding some 3D-ish features and cool-looking cartoonish avatars. All promised huge returns from an untapped market: kids and teenagers. And we've seen all those "pseudo-virtual-worlds" popping up like mushrooms, following the mantra that "kids want to chat in 3D".
Well, except for the Electric Sheep Company's WebFlock, we don't have a clue on what their business models look like (ESC puts up their prices on very bold characters for all to see how much it costs). Again, this seems to be wild speculation to catch a large userbase while burning VC funding at an extraordinary rate... without a valid business model. In some cases, without any business model at all.
Google's Lively is not different — except, of course, that Google has unlimited funds and can naturally burn as much capital as they want to make a point. It's quite disappointing to see how little effort has been put into Lively as a product — even knowing that 200 Google developers can work wonders in short time. Still, Google's honest enough to show us some numbers: the most visited room (note: they track visits, not unique visitors), Google's own, has just attracted 10,000 or so additional visitors since Day One of Lively, after two weeks — and, overall, only 20,000 new rooms have been created since the first day. One might consider those numbers to be awesome for a brand new product, but frankly, I'm not impressed — when Second Life, whose doomfall is eagerly predicted by the media, still gets 15-20,000 new user registrations every day.
We have to wait and see if Lively goes the same way as Orkut: Google has not a good track record of creating "social environments", and my guess is that there is no reason for them to succeed in 3D when they weren't very impressive with 2D.
Then again, I hope to be proven wrong.
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19 Comments
Google open source to 3D.
What a giant like Google should do is to let users to develop themselves their own "3d" worlds and characters. Google should just develop the "primordial map" and software... and "extract" from each existent site/blog a signature or a existent/defined (3D) object... so Google will become a really 3d Virtual World. Letting users to define an object that will have a certain function, shape(maybe other than 3D one), properties, (ADN) will allow users and objects to interact each other. So ... I can define a "round" object with a certain texture and elasticity and weight.. (a football ball) and let users to use it to play football.
Or I can define an object with no shape that will capture images or scan sites for certain information...
Or I can define another "thing" ... maybe and I can use the "users PC World grid" to compute some stuff...
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