Google has just entered the realm of the virtual world with the launch of Lively.

Via the Official Google Blog (“Be who you want on the web pages you visit“):

The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web.

If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator’s interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar’s look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text “[[hug]]”.

YouTube Overview of Lively

Embedded Instances

In a significant move, Google has made it possible to embed instances of Lively rooms in websites and blogs. Users login with the same credentials and can then move around, participate in text-based conversations, or right-click over objects to perform additional actions.

Additional functionality can be accessed by loading the room in a pop-up window, accessed via a button in the embedded instance.

Above is my room for example – also available as its own page. When the page is initially loaded the room is displayed as a still frame in the same convention as online video. Then upon clicking on the frame the room loads and you can begin to interact.

Considerations

As per the Lively Help Section, the application is currently Windows only:

“Lively is a Google Labs project, which means that we’re still testing it and seeking feedback. We hope to support other platforms in the future, but for now you’ll need a Windows system to access Lively.”

In terms of other system requirements, the help section indicates Lively requires:

* P3 800
* 512 MB RAM
* DX 9
* 32MB GPU (such as GeForce 2 or above)
* Flash 9 or higher
* Broadband internet connection

A myriad of rooms, not a single realm

Additionally, unlike SecondLife in which there is one single immersive environment, Lively currently operates on a room-by-room basis. Users can create their own rooms or log into public ones – all using the same login credentials – however there is no one single realm where all avatars reside and interact.

Investigations Ongoing

Having only created this island 15 minutes ago there is much of Lively still to investigate and many questions to research. For example, does the environment support audio or is communication restricted to text only?

I’ll update this post as information becomes available.

Lively is Windows Only

As mentioned above, Lively is only available for the PC. This is made very clear on the main Lively website, however users are nonetheless unhappy about the somewhat PC-centric release.

Duncan Riley at The Inquisitr cites a series of quotes from FriendFeed users who are unhappy with the llaunch and are only too happy to say so. [More on this here]

To add to this discussion, it’s not just non-Windows operating systems that won’t run Lively currently, but virtual installations as well. I just tried to access my room via the virtual instance of XP I’ve got running on Ubuntu but was told “Lively could not detect a suitable graphics driver on your computer.”

I note however that the parallel installation I have running on my MacBook via Bootcamp does let me run Lively successfully.

While I agree that it is unwise to launch a platform specific offering in the way Lively has today, as quoted above the site makes it clear that as a Lab project it is still in development and they “hope to support other platforms in the future.” Furthermore it’s not the first time Google has done this. Picasa still does not exist for Mac OSX, and Google Desktop was not made available for the Mac platform for quite some time after the PC launch was released.

For their sake I hope they rectify this vacuum quickly though, because the natives are getting restless.

Screen Shots

Here is the message I received in my virtual instance of XP when trying to load the room (full size here).