Entries from July 2008 ↓

Wherever people gather there is the chance for humanity to impart itself upon those gathered.

We should expect no less from Second Life.

In a garden pavilion on an island, I sat with an assortment of human beings - one clad as a teddy bear wearing a Santa hat, another as a brazen vixen, a blue man, a tuxedoed prom king - and poured out my heart from a place of loneliness and grief. Click click went the computer keys, like the staccato beat of my heart. Clack clack went their replies, their empathy and their own tales of triumph and woe. Via my avatar - the persona I’d created to engage here - I was participating in an “anxiety support group” in the free, virtual world of Second Life.

As I write those words, I can hear the scoffing. Pathetic! Escapist! Are you addicted to computer games? Do you have no friends? Second Life? That place is just about weird sex fantasies!

I saw my first instance of online group therapy in the form of an email list in the mid-90s. Second Life is no different really, it is just a more immersive experience than email. And that immersion could be the key to better connections and a more expressive group therapy experience. Gone are the vulnerabilities of speaking to strangers in person. Expressing issues is more important I believe than rubbing elbows at the local church.

Google today announced its new avatar 3D chat world called Lively. It could be interesting and fun but not a substitute for the more powerful Second Life.

Lively and similar products from other companies have the potential to change the way people interact over the Web. Online chat rooms are two-dimensional — they include text, and sometimes voice and video.

Lively tries to make that conversation three-dimensional, more interactive and more fun. As if they were playing a game, users choose from a selection of unrealistically handsome or Disneyesque avatars. They can also create their own rooms, which can be posted to a blog or social network profile as easily as a YouTube video.

Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another. (Text appears as cartoon-style bubbles atop the avatars.) Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google’s photo service, as if they were pieces of art.

Inside Google, the product was headed by Niniane Wang, an engineering manager. Students at Arizona State University have been testing Lively for several months.

Now if Google came out with something for the Mac. As it is, Lively is Windows only.