(Page 2 of 2)
Quality control: Rather than allow users to create their own 3-D artifacts--a practice that, in other virtual worlds, has led to shoddy and even offensive content--Google is working with a number of third-party designers to create furnishings for Lively’s “rooms.”
Google
The most telling difference between Lively and other virtual worlds, however, may be that it does not yet permit users to create their own content. In game worlds such as World of Warcraft, all of the content (mountains, trees, sofas, swords, pictures, lights, pathways, and the like) is created by professional designers. In worlds such as Second Life, all of the content is created by "residents," or users.
Developer content is of very high quality, but developers typically struggle to keep up with user demand for new content. Resident-created content can be amateurish and even offensive, but it easily keeps up with demand. Google has attempted to find a middle ground between the two, partnering with professional virtual-world companies such as RiversRunRed and Millions-of-Us, which provide content.
"I think Google has been wise to limit the extent of custom content creation to a select group of developers--for the time being," Justin Bovington, CEO of RiversRunRed, wrote in an e-mail. "Many brands have experienced pollution and even counterfeit of their brands in other 3-D worlds or environments--not to mention the questionable material that users put forth that led to a tarnished image for Second Life."
Lively's approach can be limiting, however. Second Life features about 20 plants created by its parent company Linden Lab, for instance, but there are thousands of plants created by Second Life residents. A quick tour of Lively turned up only 11 plants. Users also have recourse to only 11 different avatars, although their hair and clothes can be customized.
Mark Young, who does design work for Google, hinted on his blog that the company is working to allow user-created content. Wang added, "We plan to let users create their own content, but we don't have any details to announce at this time. It's definitely a feature that users are clamoring for."
Since Lively is a system for creating 3-D chat spaces, it competes more directly with startups like IMUV, Vivaty, and Vside than it does with Second Life. Nonetheless, whenever a company the size of Google enters a new market, it demands attention. In a statement, Mark Kingdon, CEO of Linden Lab, said, "Google's entry is strong validation for the development of virtual worlds." He went on, however, to emphasize Second Life's advantages: its immersiveness and its working internal economy. "In Second Life, unlike any other virtual world, the economy is the experience," Kingdon said. "Users are highly motivated to create and transact in Second Life to the tune of almost a million dollars a day in user-to-user transactions."
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.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
View full PDF >
Listen to story > 
Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
Handshake
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...
Reply