Home

About

metaXLR8 streaming media and game server

Español

Italiano

Produced by metafuturing

I have reported on my first splash in Google Lively in Google Lively - first test. Since then I have been reading a lot (as expected, both positive and negative comments) and playing with it some more. In the picture above, two of my avatars rest after setting up and decorating a Lively room. I was running both sessions on the same PC and watching each screen updating about one second after changes in the other.

Lively is a very preliminary product - well, it is called a beta. It does not have some necessary features yet, but I am sure they are working at the next bunch of features. The interface is different from most VR worlds - basically you do everything with the mouse, and it took me a few minutes to understand that you are supposed to move your character by dragging it with the mouse. You learn the basics in a few minutes by trying. Actually I asked people without experience in VR worlds to try, and they got it fast (less things to unlearn). I now like the interface very much, like most interfaces by Google. It is easy and fast. Of course I miss a Mac version, but they say it is coming.

I do not see Lively as a Second Life killer. Also, it does not seem aimed at videogamers (Crysis, Half Life...) or MMO users (WoW, Entropia...). Rather, it permits developing light VR microworlds that can be embedded in a web page - a 3D chatroom for a blog, or a customer service VR microsite for a business. The download is a 10M plugin that autoinstalls for IE and Firefox. Given that Lively is very easy to install and use, and in view of the fact that they will be able to leverage the huge user base of other Google services, I have no doubts that Lively will attract large numbers of users and will become the standard first introduction to the concept of metaverse. Who remembers Usenet? (It was the thing now known as Google Groups).

Since the main impact of Lively will be making the metaverse very user friendly and with a very large entry level user base, I think its launch is very good news for the industry. Also, once Lively will make micro VR worlds much more popular, many firms will ask for similar services on their own websites without the Google branding (and probably ads). This will boost the request for similar microworlds based on, for example, multiuser 3D Flash and X3D technologies.