Google Launches Lively, an Avatar Based 3D World

no.good.at.coding writes "Google has launched a Windows-only, in-browser (you need to install a client first, though) 3D avatar world — Lively — that you can embed in websites and use to interact with other people. It's not as expansive as Second Life yet, but expect things to get better."

Comments

Re:No use

[Kamokazi]

Your avatar is not really important...it's the 3D world.

It's not about chatting with your friends with some fake avatar, though many people like to do that. Some things are much easier to conceptualize in 3D. In particular, some realtors do this for showing homes online, but there are many other applications where you need to see something far away in 3D. There are plenty of times where phone, email/chat, and looking at pictures don't give you what you need. Buying something online? Pick it up and look at it like you were in a retail store. Sure this has limitations too, but it's better than a 2D image. And the 3D technology we have now is in its infancy. Eventually we will hit a point where extremely realistic 3D environments can be run on the lowest-end PC. Think about First-person shooters 10 years ago. Quake, etc...those can be run on the cheapest piece of junk from wal-mart with no difficulty at all. Now look at Crysis, a very realistic-looking 3D engine. In 10 years, do you think any PC will have trouble running it? And what do you think the cutting-edge games then will look like? This is the start of what will probably be a big part of the web's future.

Now we come to the avatar. Since most people seem to find the 3rd-person preferrential to 1st-person in this type of scenario, you pretty much need to have an avatar to move around and look at things, if for nothing else than to provide scale to what you are looking at. And some people could care less about their avatar, but some people will care about how their avatar looks. You can just make a basic, no-frills avatar, and never mess with customization, etc.