Google Launches Virtual World (Rooms) Called "Lively" | Hacker News Reader

Google Launches Virtual World (Rooms) Called "Lively"

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36 pointsdkasper45 comments

I don't understand why they didn't create the app using Flash 9. There are some really impressive 3-D apps using Flash 9 and if they used Flash, it would work on Macs and Linux also. does_not_make_sense . I honestly expected that if anything, google would come up with some cool tricks to make it work without requiring any plugins at all, even Flash.

Check out this amazing app called AlternativaPlatform (Disclaimer: They not friends of mine and I don't have any connection.) if you want to see what's possible for 3D using just regular Flash 9. It's the most impressive example that I've seen so far. The link goes to their blog, which contains a bunch of demos:

http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/

This is another really cool Flash 9 - based 3D app: http://ecodazoo.com/ (Disclaimer: No personal or financial connections here either.)

Maybe there are some technical requirements that I'm not aware of the necessitated using a custom plugin. Assuming that there was a good reason for it, why didn't they integrate it into an update for their Google Toolbar product or the Google Earth browser plugin? I'd be curious to hear any ideas on the subject.

Avi Bar-Zeev* talks about that and more in this blog post.

http://www.realityprime.com/articles/google-lively

"Ah, finally, we get to see the long rumored Google Virtual World, or one of them anyway. There’s also rumored to be another one with a remarkably similar aesthetic that’s only 2D and doesn’t require a plugin and install. [I imagine they could use this 3D technology on the server side to flatten their avatars into isometric sprites that could be rendered in Flash or AJAX, ala google maps on the client. Any bets?]"

*Avi founded Keyhole which built what eventually became Google Earth

The rumored version sounds much more interesting than the current one. The time required to test out a service using flash/ajax is just as long as the page takes to load. With an applet it probably takes a minimum commitment of at least 5-10 minutes to get the thing to install properly. And I hope that it's well-tested so that it doesn't conflict with any of my Firefox plugins...

An article linked from the realityprime.com article that you listed has an interesting quote:

Our mandate was to get usage," Guymon (note: Mel Guymon, Google's Head of 3D Operations [and former There.com developer and IMVU Co-Founder]) said of his business plan. "The difference from the startups I’ve been in is that startups have to turn a profit or die. All the projects in Google are run as startups, but we’re given an incredibly amount of rope to be successful. We’re not about to run out of money and die. For Google it’s the opportunity to get into a space that we think is really going to be important in the long term. For me personally, I think this is going to make people’s online experiences richer and more interesting. For generations coming up from age 4, this is what they expect. For Google, that was really the stake in the road"

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/07/google-announce.htm...

Any thoughts? To me it sounds like they're a bit undisciplined. I'm not sure that it's a recipe for success to just throw money at a project. Constraints often help shape a product in good ways. In this particular example, it could have been a good thing if they didn't have enough programming resources to build and test their own plugin. They would have had to live within the limitations of the flash plugin, but that tradeoff could prove in retrospect to have been well worth it.

The best in-browser cross-platform 3D solution out there today is, by a long distance, Java.

With something like JOGL or LWJGL, you get hardware accelerated 3D that's supported on Windows, Linux, OS X and Solaris and that will 'just play' in about 95% of surfers out there.

If you want to see what you can do with it, Runescape's new HD client came out recently and it looks beautiful (and runs damned quick).

Even IF Java had a flash-level 98%+ adoption rate, the UI experience with Java applets in the real world has never been good in my experience. There is an annoying startup time before the apps load, Java sometimes crashes my browser, and the most ridiculous thing of all is that the last few 'advanced 3d' apps that I've tried running display a horrific security warning message saying that the app is untrusted. Apparently you can sign the apps to remove the warning, but why is it that people aren't always doing that? Is there some huge fee that Sun charges to sign your apps? I'm sorry but I'm not willing to give an untrusted browser app full access to my file system. Flash doesn't allow full access PERIOD (which definitely limits its usefulness in some applications) and I don't have to even worry before trying a new app.

Anyhow, I still haven't seen any compelling reasons to use Java that are so incredible that they outweigh these serious shortcomings. I think it's just a total non-starter. And with Flash starting to now support hardware 3D acceleration with Flash 10, there is one less reason to use Java.

Why?!

A few years ago Google was doing awesome new cool stuff... significantly better search, advertising products, cutting edge JavaScript stuff like Google Maps and Gmail, etc.

Now they just seem to be copying things others have done first, like Open Social, Android, App Engine, and now Lively.

If you think about it almost every Google product has been directly inspired by something else. They're in the business of evolutionary improvements and throwing their weight behind them (Offering 1GB storage on Gmail for example or free Google App Engine). Sounds kind of like what Microsoft did really.

Indeed. Even their adwords/adsense business model was copied from Overture.

When something is a god awful as Overture though, it makes a great deal of sense to copy parts of the model, but do it properly.

1. Because they are a business and there is also profit in exploiting existing markets.

2. Even if you ask an engineer what his or her dream product is, it's often something like "(existing thing) done right".

3. How do you know that your other examples won't turn out to be as innovative? It took Google years to figure out search advertising. You just think that Google miraculously produced perfect software the first time around, because you weren't paying as much attention before.

But I will grant you one point. The old Google had a rule that they wouldn't get into a market unless they thought they had a chance of being 10x better than anyone else. It's hard to believe that Lively is going to be 10x better than the other social MMOs.

#1 would be true if Google actually made money from anything other than their advertising products.

Actually, they do -- the Google intranet search thingy is profitable. There are a few other sources of revenue like Google Earth licensing. But these are like candles next to a supernova.

A search engine in 1998 was not original. The implementation and execution were. And Gmail bills itself as "a Google approach to email," so I think they are quite consciously doing the same old stuff in a totally new way.

Are there any products they've made that are really new, versus done better? I can't think of any, though I'm sure there must be a few.

Am I the only one who is concerned that when the Metaverse comes, we'll all be cartoons and giant walking penises?

Do you mean a metaverse in a singularity?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse

Ah - it was "the Metaverse" phrasing that confused me. Presumably there wouldn't be just one.

That looks really un-googly. The whole idea of chatting with someone using a complicated 3D avatar goes against google's usual fondness for simplicity in interface design. I assume it started out as somebody's side project, but I'm amazed that they launched it.

I'm sure it's a well-polished product, and that it'll be popular with teenage girls, but "popular with teenage girls" isn't usually google's goal, is it?

I'm unimpressed, I was expecting Google Earth to become their virtual world product.

Creating their own virtual worlds gives them access to their own real (virtual) estate that they can plaster with ads.

Avatar based chats are probably better than existing text-in-a-window ones for multi-person conversations because of the ease with which we can localize and assign voices to faces. I'd consider this the first significant step (by Google) in doing away with physical co-location of office workers.

>I'd consider this the first significant step (by Google) in doing away with physical co-location of office workers.

You mean starting with themselves? Google are very much old school in terms of making people work in regular (ish) offices, partly through culture and partly through the need for hush hush security.

Um, I work at Google, and I know people that have come into the office once in the past six months.

> Google are very much old school in terms of making people work in regular (ish) offices

This is just not true.

Well thats good to hear (I only know people in Sydney and Mountain View offices, and they tell me they didn't know anyone that worked like that).

Of course its nice to have good offices to go to when you so choose. Its just I know that when I go to an office I normally get nothing done (its almost too social).

Perhaps it would seem more Googly if it were called "Google Rooms" instead of Lively.

I somewhat disagree about this not being very "Googley." Although Lively is very different than the Google homepage in terms of presentation; both share the same ends of organizing the world's information and making it accessible. Google's press release blog post about Lively suggests, "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]]" [1]. Perhaps in some abstract sense, Lively allows users to store and present information that is difficult to disseminate via text or other currently available methods. On the other hand, maybe it's just Google's way of making money on a perceived market that is the intersection between video gamers and Facebookers.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/be-who-you-want-on-we...

anyone else noted that lively uses facebook account as default?

http://www.lively.com/help/bin/answer.py?answer=98532&sr...

"Requires Windows Vista/XP"

Boo.

I'd say the sort of people likely to be interested in playing with virtual avatars are likely to be running Windows.

Maybe that's a generalization too far, but it seems like it should be so.

Please elaborate.

Lively browser plugin uses DirectX 9.

This is trouble for <a href="http://areae.net">Areae</a>, an online gaming platform startup that has Raph Koster and a few other names (including a friend of mine).

These online virtual world/gaming technologies are actually fairly simple to implement. I am sure that someone as enlightened as Raph Koster probably realizes that there are lots of companies, not to mention college kids in dorms, putting these together right now. SOME of those projects are bound to be better than his, others worse. Believe me, they have probably already factored that in to their plan.

If not, I agree, this is bad news for them, because hundreds more are coming.

I have this gut feeling that Google recently acquired some company that was already doing all of this stuff. Although I can't tell who, and TC doesn't hint towards anyone.

Regardless, this service isn't all that new. There are lots of characters created in the summer 2007 timeframe linked from the Catalog page (like http://www.lively.com/catalog/details?mid=-84971956863432942...).

No, Google TRIED to acquire IMVU. When IMVU pulled a Yahoo, Google decided to hire away one of their key guys, who was a co-founder as well. Then they put him on Lively.

Google is learning to do business the Microsoft way. Make an offer ONCE. They don't take it . . . make an example of them. The next startup you want will take the money, even if you are lowballing them.

Citation required.

Among other places:

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/07/google-announce.htm...

best comment on techcrunch:

google has just "jumped the shark."

Lilvely uses facebook accounts?

Google uses facebook accounts?

http://www.lively.com/help/bin/answer.py?answer=98532&sr...

wtf??

Facebook Connect and all that jazz.

There is interest in the corporate space for 3d interaction of tools and equipment w/ folks from different geos. Complex troubleshooting, training, etc.

I'll be playing with Lively in the morning behind the firewall.

My first reaction to this is "omg! wtf!? why?", but I really shouldn't knock it until i've tried it. This could actually be really cool...IF you have windows xp/vista and like this sort of thing.

Hopefully they'll integrate it with their actually functional apps.

I'm still waiting for the metaverse where I can accomplish real tasks in a pseudo-natural way.

This reminds me of The Sims: Online game from back in 2002. Even the music sounds similar to The Sims game.

google 2008 = microsoft 2004

edit: microsoft 1994

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