It’s Lively in the virtual sea

Yesterday, I looked at two new virtual world launches. The first one I’ve already blogged in a separate post that will be published either later today or tomorrow. The second and more interesting to me is Lively by Google which allows any Windows Google account user to quickly and easily insert a 3D virtual room into a web page.  Here’s an example inline embed (RSS readers, you may want to click into the post to actually see) of the underwater room I created from a free template in less than five minutes below.

Fellow writer Darius, also a fellow Mac user, noted that this does not work with the Mac yet. It does work in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Lively is fairly limited at this time. From what I could see you can’t create any objects yet, only add objects to your room what’s already available.

In the screenshot above you’ll see my underwater room has only three chairs because that’s all that were available. I didn’t see how to be able to sit in the chairs, so unless that’s possible somehow, these objects are merely window dressing. Update 11:11am PST: Lestat figured this out and shared. You just double-click on the seat cushion to sit in the chairs

In its current state, Lively is like IRC in 3D. You can meet your friends in a room and chat with bubbles over your head. I’ve seen many attempts to do this type of thing over the years but the only one that comes to mind as being a big success is Habbo Hotel.

Some bloggers are already stating this as a threat to Second Life, but that’s giving Lively way too much credit at this point. Sure, if Google gets behind this and continues to improve upon it, maybe someday but Lively in its current incarnation is no threat. When there is an ability to actually create original objects (can’t do yet), stream audio and video (can’t do yet), interact with objects (how can you do this?), then we can entertain this possibility. Linden Lab already has their own Lively room, BTW, called Linden Lab in Lively.

This coming Friday’s radio show perhaps we can demo this with a bigger group and see what we can break. For those who don’t want to wait, can join one of the popular rooms like the chess room which resembles a gigantic chess board and has had thousands of visitors as of this writing.

I’m going to try and keep this running in a separate window today. Feel free to stop in and see what we can break. I like the underwater seascape, but I’m not sure this will ever be any replacement for IRC to me. Not in its current state. What do you think?