Orrorin’s Diary

O Lively, Lively, why are you so lovely?

I have been waiting for you for a long time to come. Finally and surprisingly it is Google who arrived with this new application: Lively

There are many virtual worlds on the internet, what makes me melt in front of Lively.com?

Second Life, There and the others showed us we have the technology to build virtual worlds. However most of them lacked a conducting line, something more relevant than just chatting. Video games like World of Warcraft (WOW) added background and a raison d’être to the whole story. People joining know why they are there and what they are supposed to do.

Virtual worlds have to evolve and bring content, this is one of the reasons why we start seeing them merge or become compatible supporting avatar movements between them.

Lively and Vivaty are following another scheme and work on another scale. Both of them use a decentralized structure implementing links in existing platforms like blogs or social networks. Today each of this links works separately creating a unique room. I personally installed Lively on my blog and started creating my own personal “chez moi”.

Anybody can create a room or house in other existing virtual worlds. But what’s amazing about it?

The way Lively works or at least I hope will function in the near future, is like the ghost portraits in Harry Potter or the painting used by the protagonists in the Sandman Comic books. The way I envision it is that with time, Google will build tunnels linking the existing rooms, therefore supporting the travelling of an avatar from one place to another. This means that with time blogs, social networks and virtual worlds will become one. The search for contacts will be done through virtual travel, but the real content or personal ID will be the person’s blog or profile. This might become a possible evolution to the actual search engines in combination with behavioral and semantic search.

As I tried to explain in my last post, the iPhone opened something new, transforming with time a mobile phone into a person’s virtual ID. The relation between mobile phone and virtual worlds will grow through this new infrastructure. Again, hardware is becoming more dependent on the road software is taking. As the Web2.0 is related to human interaction and the Web3.0 to human - technology interaction, we may expect to see a lot of virtualization. This might give a whole new meaning to the Google Phone and Android.

Virtual Worlds are considered today as additional worlds parallel to ours. However, an infrastructure like Lively might actually create a new layer to our real world.