Google lively: 3D environment!

***NOTE:  This product is no longer available as it was part of an experient.

Anyone who likes to try new Google products (like me) will really get a kick out of their new “Google Lively” 3D online building code.  The interesting part about this is the amount of different things you can do with the online environment.  It reminds me of “The Sims” game but in an online version. You can even choose to go into an inventory and select more furniture or avatars that you’d like to use. Once you’re done, you can invite people to come and chat as well as post it on your website through a snippet of code (iframe):

You can chat as well. I wonder whether they’ll incorprate the whole gchat idea into this site. There are multitude of different rooms to pick from if you didn’t want to create your own you can select a room to chat or hang around. This reminded me of the old CompuServe Dreamscape (if anyone remembers this, thank you!) where you’d go and socialize with other avatars, etc.

This application was about a 480K download and a 45 second installation. It was mostly transparent and I had it in the background while working on another browser. You can use your gmail single sign-on to view to create your room and sign-in to another popular room. As well, you can walk around your 3D space with your mouse and move furniture around as well. The concept of this is quite interesting. I’d like to see how Google manages to use this 3D infrastructure for ads (ie - KFC booths, McDonalds, etc) as part of their campaign.

I see great potential in this as well as new online dating communities that would love a piece of this action. Considering that it’d be way more fun to interact with avatars than just click on profiles, users can hang out at their ‘favourite’ joints and meet people who like to do the same thing. This would put a new dimention on online dating especially if Google Lively ever turns into a large walkable community hopping into city-to-city, building-to-building, room-to-room.

I’d also like create some custom content for this as well (maybe make my avatar look more like me, etc) which would completely overhaul the ‘personal’ touch of the online community. And an API to hook this application to my various projects.

Since this is still in beta, there are still a lot of quirks with the code and some annoyances. The walking around the environment can become choppy when there’s a lot around for it to render. The chatting moves around with the walking and thus making the chat ‘boxes’ very messy and obviously needs more maturity for more customizations to take place. However, it’s a great tool and has lots of optential to grow into something just massive!

Taking over the second life space… how interesting! There is a little youtube video on the site as well. Take a look at the website for more information: www.lively.com