Rumors about a move by Google into virtual worlds predicted a, well, world killer, but in the end, Google Lively was the one that got the axe.
Google’s Lively Was Always Under Construction:
CNet reports that the Google Lively blog has announced that it is no longer pursuing the technology. Google reported on its blog:
“”Despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year,” Google said on its official blog Wednesday evening. “It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.” “
It was clear from the start that Google’s Lively didn’t add anything serious to the virtual world ecosystem. It was kind of like Vivaty, for example, but only 1/20th as good. It was touted as a successor to Second Life but the avatars were little cartoon characters, hardly vehicles for immersion or even, for that matter, much socializing, the avatars were always in other rooms somewhere, and there was little to do – few games to play, or puzzles to sort out, nothing to build, just a lot of embedded youTube videos maybe. Sure, users tried to throw some sex in, but that was quickly squashed.
So now, I guess, one of the many virtual me’s will have to, well, disappear. Or maybe I’ll end up in some sort of virtual Wayback Machine? I’ll miss the blue hair, but then again I have some in inventory somewhere.
Lively’s business model and policy wasn’t particularly well thought out. Take the phishing scams, evidence that Google hadn’t quite thought through the implications of embedded rooms:
“Of course, the fact that Lively rooms are embedded in the browser, and can be further embedded in any site, it means that all Web sites that have Lively rooms want you to access those rooms by entering your username and password into the Google application. With the pop-up input screen, the URL isn’t visible, so it isn’t terribly difficult to replicate the input console in a way that the user doesn’t realize that he’s not entering a Google domain.”
AdSense for Lively didn’t make much more sense, and they started looking like a game:
“Google spilled part of its intentions by announcing its virtual world — or more appropriately virtual room. The company launched Lively by Google earlier this month. Lively by Google would be a natural vehicle for Google’s AdSense for Games product, which could insert ads into the rooms of users. In fact, others expect it to be a proving ground.”
As for user-generated content, they had the idea but it was definitely early days:
Google’s Lively wasn’t ready for prime time. The only thing it had going for it was the Google name. But in a world where “casual” virtual environments pop up like weeds, it’s only the ones that really work, like Vivaty, say, or that have a unique feature or game/social mechanism, that will have the potential for staying power.
In the meantime there’s little to match the immersive Second Life platform. Blue Mars – maybe. But then again, it’s being beat to the punch by Entropia when it comes to quality of graphics, and has a strange business model to boot.
Mycosym – maybe. But it also has an odd business model, and they’ve been talking a lot at the conferences but have been a bit thin on follow-up: not an encouraging sign. Stay under the radar if you’re not ready.
But the surprise virtual world entry is the one that arrived before Google Lively, in my opinion, and that’s Google Earth itself, which is about as comprehensive a virtual world as you can imagine. The only thing missing are avatars. Oh, and objects beyond the building facades. But with a new version of Sketch-Up – who knows, all the pieces of the pipeline are there, aren’t they?
Google has hardly abandoned virtual worlds. They already have one. You can already visit virtual cities, and layer data, and fly through, and explore. The only thing you can’t do, perhaps, is buy shoes and decent hair, and that’s no small thing, but maybe they can port the cartoons over from Lively and we can all meet in virtual Ancient Rome. Empires come and go, and others just relocate.
…or role play
Or role play. True. Or commerce. Or owning land. Hmmm now that I think about it.
….Mind you, I’ve always bought the metaverse roadmap definitions, distinguishing between mirror worlds and immersive ones. What’s intriguing about SL and the Grid is that it’s, in some ways, acting like it’s both with more real/virtual world connections. You see life-logging of a sort in SL as well, and that MIT project is a lot like augmented reality, in some respects. So I suppose it’s important to define what “quadrant” we’re talking about.
Lively was immersive, but the only level you could get to really was decorating and chat.
One word reaction: hooray!
It continues to bother me to no end that the press lumps all systems with avatars into “virtual worlds”. A world is a large connected place that you traverse seamlessly (except for border crossings I suppose). Applications that serve up disconnected rooms are not worlds. That will be the case with Blue Mars as well, which while supporting larger spaces, will still be disconnected. Some day the press and eventually the general public will come to appreciate the power of a connected world, where you an just pick a direction and walk until the ban lines or end of the map get in your way.
Whoah! Big news. Now watch the mainstream media declare the death of virtual worlds. After all, if the biggest online company in the world has given up on them then that must be the end of it! *sigh*
And I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that Google Earth is a virtual world, it’s missing a key component – the MMO bit. Where are the avatars, the socialisation? It’s the social networking aspect that makes virtual worlds rock. That’s why they don’t even have to be 3D, like Habbo and Club Penguin.
Until these other worlds offer the creativity that Second Life has to offer they will flop. Blue Mars is one to look at, although the everyday person will not be able to build, I’m sure there are some positives in that, but the thing that still keeps me in Second Life is that the limitations are still very much boundless.
Did you see that Alexey Pajitnov is among the creators of Blue Mars? (Or at least in their advisory board.) He is the guy who invented Tetris.
Re: Blue Mars – it has some good talent behind it. Syd Mead is involved. Looks beautiful. But the theme and business model is a lot like Entropia no? And while it may have had a visual edge, Entropia has just announced that it’s switching to Crysis as well for graphics – so what will the difference be?
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.
[...] popular or because Google didn’t like the fact that people were using it for sexual purposes. At Dusan Writer’s Metaverse, he notes that the service wasn’t very good to start with, something with which I concur. When I tried it out, I was disappointed by the small number of [...]
Umm, just a minor caveat. Vivaty and Lively are both true 3D. Why do you call them “not three dimensional” and “2.5D”? Metaplace, Habbo, those are 2.5D. And Maple Story is 2d.
Raph – I stand corrected. Thanks.
ive noticed a few blogs/stories- mimicing the 2.5d meme..
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
Well what’s odd about the 2.5D meme is – well, WHY did I think it was 2.5D? Because it really didn’t feel 3D to me. And I’m going to chalk it up to a few things, although I really should log in again to have a look and make sure my memory serves, but here goes:
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.
[...] was a nice experiment, but it will soon be over: Google Lively will be discontinued. As Dusan Writer says: But the surprise virtual world entry is the one that arrived before Google Lively, in my [...]
i think it was livelys “horrible” drag the curser/avatar around by mouse- interface that “gave” you the limited feel of sapce and the ability to navigate in it.
there were camera/poc controls, but they worked really poorly as interface IMO, and coupled with the limited” as far as my mousepad goes” technique of av dragging it created a very “limited” feel space.
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.
I look forward to seeing Blue Mars and the new CE2 version of Entropia Universe.
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.
The Livelyzens (Lively users) are coming together to appeal to Google to keep Lively alive.
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.