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.
Second Life, Open Sim, and now there are sniffs of Google in the metaverse wind.
Massively thinks so.
major media outlets speculated that Google would use its then-newly-acquired SketchUp asset to turn Google Earth into some sort of Second Life-type experience. Then The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was to acquire Adscape Media Inc., a company that specializes in creatively integrating advertising into games. In September, ASU students began testing a mysterious application very likely connected to Google, and observers speculated that the application could be a 3D virtual environment.
Google made a deal with Multiverse (the company connected to the possibly problematic Firefly MMO) to sync Multiverse’s flexible virtual reality engine with Google’s assets and tools. The Reuters blog MediaFile points out that au courant industry figures are taking the existence of a Google virtual world for granted at this point.
The fire keeps getting more fuel. Multiverse’s Corey Bridge was quoted in The Financial Times describing a future when people will use their real identities (rather than fictional character avatars) to interact with one another in virtual worlds that will be integrated into social networking platforms similar to Facebook or MySpace. Google is making a huge social networking push this month.
Google has a unique ability to increase market pressures and push users into new technologies. Second Life is adding about 1000 private islands a month. Imagine what would happen if Google ups and adds a thousand or so islands. Or, what if every Gmail account suddenly gets 2048 square meters of OpenSim space?
Once OpenSim can link into the SL grid, the metaverse changes forever and no one knows how it will change.
Me and a friend of mine was standing in front of her store and while we were shooting the breeze a Google Street View car drove by - just like the one shown below.
What is a Street View car? Google is taking 3D images of all the streets in cities across the nation to show what the locations of a precise point on a Google Map will look like. To capture these images, they drive a fleet of cars around the nation with a 3D camera on top and a GPS computer to plot what photo goes with which coordinate. Today, one whipped by us in downtown Winston-Salem. Here is an example of Google Maps with Street View enabled - (Bay Bridge, San Francisco). From there you can navigate around the map with the real 3D imaging on the screen.
