Welcome to the wonderful world of low-polygon modelling! Judging by the screenshots, the models are actually quite good work; the artist definitely has some skill.

It’s difficult to create a complex object from only a few hundred polygons. I’d be surprised if the purple lady had more than 200 polys, or the mech more than 300 polys. For reference, the SL avatar mesh has about 4000 polys at its highest detail level.

Sure, they look pretty crude next to the 15,000-poly characters on your Xbox360, but a more fair comparison would be with some of the games of yester-year, like American McGee’s Alice (http://tinyurl.com/6qx6xc) or MechWarrior IV (http://tinyurl.com/66pzcf)

As a 3D artist (one of the many hats I wear), it’s pretty interesting that you could import arbitrary meshes into Lively. Sculpties just can’t compare to the efficiency of a well-crafted low-poly model. (Not that most models we would see in SL would be either well-crafted *or* low-poly…)

Obviosly our approach is based on user generated contents, photography and machinima…….

So, we read with a few excitements your post about the Beta of Lively Contents Tools…..

as Gwineth we are wondering which is the exact target of the Lively project…..which is the main aim of the Google Virtual World…..

While waiting for more precise answers, we have launched a channel on the website for sharing rooms, snapshots and avatars from Lively
( http://www.koinup.com/in-lively/ )

Here is my take on Lively and its users (of course, I may change my mind as soon as this afternoon): It is a cute animated interface that will replace text messaging and swallow up the SMS crowd.

Period.

Linden needs to accelerate HTML on a prim. The ability to watch movies, surf the Web and perhaps even play games from within a world adds a richer social dimension. Not that we all want to sit at home watching TV of course. For collaboration and building branded environments, for embedding games and whatnot, and for not needing to worry about all that smut and stuff that Lively is trying to clean out (hey, we dealt with mature content long ago, it’s Lively’s turn) – HTML would go a long way to allowing both richer media in world but also importing legacy content.

Race against time, sure – but it always will be, I suppose. Lively and all those mini spaces are training wheels. Second Life is still the high-powered hog (yeah) on the block.

Lively might still have a chance to compete with, well, whatever… we’ll have to wait and see. Yes, ugly avatars/content on very slow and heavy platform are just the marks of something new and bright that has just been launched — we SL residents are all used to it!

In fact, I believe that the early adopters of Lively will mostly be SL residents. We’re the only ones in the market that are used to subquality content, slow development time, waiting years for features, and still enjoy developing content — in SL. However, if Google is positioning itself to attract just the type of users with a very low expectancy, they’ll only be able to attract SL residents… and for that, Lively has to become a real alternative to SL, which it isn’t, and even with 200 developers at Lively (many of which content creators!), it’ll take a few years to be at that stage.

(And obviously SL will not stagnate during those years)

So it’s another race against time?… Well, Google has a huge advantage over Linden Lab: infinite resources, and no pressure to make Lively a profitable product. Almost none of Google’s products are profitable (except for AdSense/AdWords, and possibly Checkout). So they can afford to wait 2 or 3 years until Lively becomes a serious player in the VW market. Linden Lab cannot afford that — they have to continue to be profitable.

We’ll see. But the images you show are definitely interesting!