Noticed a boatload of comments on Google Lively this morning (it was released yesterday). Since I don’t have time to play with it right now, here’s a round-up of what others are saying:
you can pipe in content hosted elsewhere on the Internet, including photos or videos. For another, you can embed your Lively area into your blog or, using widgets Google has written, on MySpace and Facebook Web pages. And you can e-mail your friends a normal Web address to get them to join. You can set up you own online spaces–rooms, grassy meadows, desert islands, and you can change the clothing or form of your avatar.
it runs within the browser on the Windows machine very well and does not seem to take a super-machine to work it.
The avatars in the pictures look really interesting, kind of Tim-Burton-Esc”. It is taking a little time for the “room” to materialize, but still pretty cool. There is a lot going on.
I just started playing around with it, so it’s a bit early to say exactly what its role will be in the world of emerging technologies. A quick initial reaction: it’s Second Life distributed.We should be able to experience it in our environments (such as blogs, wikis, or even LMS’). At first glance, Google seems to be trying something similar with virtual worlds – namely, have the world available where you want it, rather than forcing you to go to a certain space.
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]]”.
Prior to this release, we worked closely with Arizona State University. Based on feedback from ASU students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Better yet, the gadgets you have in your Lively rooms can also run on your desktop.
Well, this sucks for Second Life
Lively runs completely in the browser and you use your Google account to log in and create your own avatars. Within the world, you can interact with other users, very much like you would do in Second Life. You can also watch YouTube clips on virtual TVs and share your own photos.
See more here at Google Lively. And, here’s a video.
Facebook/Janet Clarey
LinkedIn/jclarey
Twitter/jclarey
Skype/janetclarey
GMail/JClarey
Blog/Instructional Design
{ 1 trackback }
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Janet, my take on this is that it reminds me of when lots of fonts became available in word-processing apps in the late 1980’s. Some people got excited, but a natural counter-reaction was, “I just don’t really need 50 fonts.”
But now we know that the fonts were a step in the evolution toward anybody being able to desktop-publish any type of document they want.
Google Lively seems kind of similar. The counter-reaction: “I just don’t really need avatars in my chat messages.”
But maybe the evolution is that we’re quickly getting to bringing shared documents to 3D space (or, said the opposite way, bringing 3D space to shared documents).
If Google Lively evolves into us having a clubhouse where our Google Docs are easy to find and work on together, that might be interesting.
Tom Werners last blog post..A Giant Likert-Scale Social-Graphing Tool in Second Life
I think there are currently some issues holding back adoption of virtual worlds in education. EG even large state-funded institutions here in NZ don’t have the consistent bandwidth. This means I’m unable to make any serious use of such tools in my professional development activities.
I wrote about this problem in a recent post (http://www.verso.co.nz/professional-development/114/why-i-am-not-yet-using-virtual-worlds-in-my-work/).
Lively presents an additional barrier for many of us – it’s Windows-only. But it’ll be interesting to see how it develops – I see its distributed approach a more fruitful avenue for educators to explore than the more ‘closed’ worlds we’ve seen to date. I just need to wait for a Mac version to become available…
Paul Lefts last blog post..Why I am not (yet) using virtual worlds in my work
Hi Paul.
Excellent points. Consistent bandwidth and platform incompatibility are significant barriers for distributed learning via virtual worlds. Your post is a reminder that we have a long way to go.
I think there are currently some issues holding back adoption of virtual worlds in education. EG even large state-funded institutions here in NZ don't have the consistent bandwidth. This means I'm unable to make any serious use of such tools in my professional development activities.
I wrote about this problem in a recent post (http://www.verso.co.nz/professional-development...).
Lively presents an additional barrier for many of us – it's Windows-only. But it'll be interesting to see how it develops – I see its distributed approach a more fruitful avenue for educators to explore than the more 'closed' worlds we've seen to date. I just need to wait for a Mac version to become available…
Paul Lefts last blog post..Why I am not (yet) using virtual worlds in my work