Google Opens "Lively," Its Own Virtual World

Should Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, start quaking in its boots? Nah. This isn't the same sort of virtual world. But on Tuesday Google opened up Lively, its own take on a virtual world, but rather than being one big world its more like being a series of distributed rooms spread across the Internet.

Lively requires a download, much like Second Life (sorry, Windows only), but once installed, you just use your browser, either Internet Explorer or Firefox, to navigate to sites with embedded rooms.

As Google announced in their blog post,

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]]”.

And there are already plenty of rooms - check out the "popular" rooms on Lively. Of course, embedding such rooms on Facebook and MySpace pages: a major feature.

And The National Geographic Channel has the distinction of creating the first branded room in Lively, one dedicated to NGC's new show, "L.A. Hard Hats."

Of course, as I've said before - a long time ago - are we starting to reach a point where we interact less with each other and more with our electronic gizmos and the Internet?

I'd much rather interact with a real person than I would an avatar. Unless, perhaps the avatar belonged to say, Rosalyn Sanchez, that is.