Lively (Google's answer to Second Life)

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Permalink Reply by Rich White on July 9, 2008 at 2:05pm

Really surprised how plain, lightweight, and un-interactive it is (given that its a 3D virtual world !) .. Being "Google" they could have really done this right & leveraged Google Earth, Sketchup, their 3D warehouse, etc. .... Linden Labs has to be breathing a huge sigh of relief if this is all Google has planned for their 3D web strategy.

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Permalink Reply by David Kapuler on July 9, 2008 at 2:28pm

Yea, who knows, although Google is pretty smart and it is barely our of alpha mode.

I'm curious to see how their new phone the Android stacks up to the iPhone.

http://code.google.com/android/

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Permalink Reply by Tim Owens on July 9, 2008 at 2:31pm

To be honest I always found Second Life to be buggy and very uncompelling. In that regard my reaction to Lively was almost completely identical to the first time I fired up SL. "This is it? Hmmm....moving on." Perhaps I'm not a target audience though. The only reason spaces like this compel me would be that it would make for an awesome arena to hold discussions for an online classroom. Allowing students to express themselves through their avatars and whatnot. But yeah, the actual program was limited, buggy, and generally not worth spending much time in.

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Permalink Reply by KerryJ on July 9, 2008 at 5:59pm

It obviously doesn't have the level of control or sophistication of Second Life - it couldn't and be that accessible.

It's early days yet -- the interface with YouTube brings in videos quickly and the controls, while they take getting used to are - according to other avatars I talked with - very similar to the Sims. Some people were comparing some of the template spaces to EverQuest and World of Warcraft -- so not hard to see who the target market is.

I didn't like the lack of control I had over animations. When I typed in lol - my character went off into shrill hysterical laughter. When I typed Hi she trilled Hi--eee in a loud saccharine voice.

I'm going to take a wait and see approach. For me, Second Life has several advantages from an education and communication perspective. The level of control, the ability to build from scratch, the level of realism balanced with whimsy -- but I think it's comparing apples and oranges.

Lively seems to be more about the chat and having fun -- although I'll admit to being turned off my first time in yesterday when a male avatar repeatedly punched a female avatar in the face and was laughing as it happened. I've persisted and had some interesting conversations this morning. Here's a quick and dirty video:
http://flickr.com/photos/kerryank/2653528443/

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Permalink Reply by David Kapuler on July 10, 2008 at 8:18am

Wow, thanks so much for the in depth review on this site. When I watched the demo video on their site, I was a little turned off when I saw avatars punching each other and all that.

As of right now, it does feel to be more geared towards kids in a gaming atmosphere even though it does have options to create a more realistic environment such as Second Life.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Dickie on July 11, 2008 at 6:13am

I like the idea, since it would cost a lot to buy an Island in Teen Second Life but it would be free to have my own classroom in Lively. However, one of the things I liked about Second Life was the ability to create stuff. You can't do that in Lively yet (if ever).

I may put a Lively room in my class Ning this fall.

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Permalink Reply by Uskoob on July 15, 2008 at 9:01pm

Doesn't look like its mac compatible - so its a dud for me

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Permalink Reply by David Kapuler on July 16, 2008 at 7:55am

Yea me too, but I'll give it a shot when it transfers over, of course, we can boot into Windows if we wanted to try it out, but it's not ideal for my district right now.

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