Lively is a great platform for interaction as well as creativity. It is easy to use, browser based, embeddable on webpages to bring a 3D experience right on your website. While Lively has been in beta and has limited capability in terms of the objects and avatars available, the Livelyzens have been able to come up with very creative ways to create art from what is available. All this in a “clean” 3D world thanks to Google’s vigilance in getting rid of rooms with inappropriate content. More than anything, Lively has become a place to make friends for life – from all over the world with wonderful people.

Please visit our website http://livelyzens.com and participate in the Lively Machinima contest we are conducting to show the creative potential of Google Lively. Please also sign our online petition http://livelyzens.com/petition.aspx

We kindly request netizens to support us in reviving a wonderful 3D world that is a kid friendly and a creative space for art and interaction amongst adults.

Building is certainly part of the Second Life attraction for many users, but how many? This article is interesting:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/why-reuters-left-second-life-and-how-linden-lab-can-fix-it
“The very things that most appeal to Second Life’s hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex”

Based on my experience as developer and event organizer in SL, I think building things is not very important for many users – quality content and interesting events are more important. I think this is the case for a majority of users.

WoW does not allow it and is much more popular than SL, with experimental initiatives to take it beyond FPS and use it like a social VR world:
http://metaxlr8.com/blog/index.php/First_Scientific_Conference_in_World_of_Warcraft

I think Blue Mars (for what I have read so far, I hope to be in the beta soon), open to professional 3rd party developers but not to casual users, may become an interesting social world.

but it was all 3d engine driven…-)

i still think the other blogs just kept rss/copy /pasted the wrong info— from one blog to another.

1. As I recall, your camera position was limited
2. This did not allow you to have a sense that you were actually in control of your avatar, or “seeing through their eyes”
3. Although it may have been a 3D space, I don’t remember being able to rotate my view around from the back – am I wrong about that?
4. You moved your avatar by lifting it up with your mouse button and moving it around like a chess piece.

OK, so maybe it’s not technically a 2.5D space, but these things made it feel less fully ’rounded’ somehow than a true 3D space like you’d find in a game, whatever. It’s more how it feels, I guess, than technically what it was. I mean, sure, it wasn’t Isometric or whatever but I don’t remember feeling like I was actually “in” my avatar because of the camera and the avatar movement controls.

Finally, I didn’t mean to lump Vivaty in as a 2.5D world, it just ended up in a paragraph about virtual environments popping up. In any case, I corrected the post.

But there’s something in all of this about when does an avatar feel like “you”, does it need to be 3D to do that, do avatar movement controls matter, and in the absence of decent game mechanics or other features, if it doesn’t feel like you, (or an imaginary version of same) then what the heck are you there for in the first place.

maybe er.. research.. and editing.. before “publishing” would be the answer to WHY?..lol

more fun in the age of google “doing no evil”…

anyhow , i rss therefore i am.

c3

Blue Mars won’t allow content creation in world, you’ll need to either be approved or buy a grid or whatever, very complicated and only top-end developers need apply.

Mycosym – nice approach, mini Grids and so on, think openSim but with nicer graphics – but again, content will be developed external to the world, no rezzing prims, although taking advantage of current 3D content pipelines. But their economic model is odd, at least the way I understand it.

I don’t see anything on the horizon (OpenSim excepted) in which you an rez prims in world – but you tell me…is this a pro or a con? Maybe with 3D programs like TruSpace (free), Blender, Poser, etc. we should all be making stuff on our own, but there’s something different to me about being able to build in a social space. Otherwise it’s more of a game somehow.