New service from Google announced recently called Lively. It’s been billed as a Second Life competitor, which I guess is a close description, but it doesn’t come anywhere near the functionality, yet. The main difference is that it lives inside a webpage, which is pretty cool, although right now the plugin is PC only (IE or Firefox). Installing the plugin was pretty simple, and I was able to start using it without even restarting Firefox, which was nice. Lively has crashed on me several times, however (just did it again), so things don’t look very stable, yet.
Once you login, you can create an avatar based on the ten currently available. I chose a male avatar and then started to customize it. It took several tries to get this to work, but once it started working, I was able to change everything about the appearance of my character.
Moving around the room was a bit awkward. You have to mouse over your character to get the little move icon to appear, which allows you to click and then drag it around. There isn’t a walking animation, so you just kind of float around. Also, the camera follows you, but not very well. I frequently had to stop moving in order to reposition the camera so that I could continue on my path.
There are objects that you can add to the room and move around, which makes it kind of fun. I didn’t play with them much, yet, but might later on. I’m also interested in creating my own room. There are already tons of them out there.
I should get back to work, so I can’t play any more with it right now.
