Google Terminates Lively

FornaxChemica writes "In a surprise move, Google announced today, both on-site and in its blog, that it will permanently shut down its 3D virtual world, Lively, by the end of the year. This makes Lively one of Google's few scrapped products, and one of the most short-lived, too, barely lasting 6 months. No official reason was given, only that Google wants to 'prioritize [its] resources and focus more on [its] core search, ads and apps business.' Lively might have taken too much and given back too little, even by Google's standards."

Comments

Good Riddance

[Ngarrang]

No, srsly. Good by, Lively. Of all Google betas, this one has stinker written on it from the start. I have a reasonably fast PC, memory and internet connection, and Lively was a dog! A one-legged dog trying to run in the 100 yd dash.

Maybe instead of a multi-user interactive world, they can turn search results into 3D experience. You enter your search term and a cloud of results appear. You move about, click on a result to see the page, or click on it to get a different set of search results. Efficient? No. High Eye-Candy factor? Yes.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

2nded. That's a fucking disaster.

Re:Good Riddance

[bendodge]

3D interfaces are nothing but eye candy without a 3D HID. That's the reason people are willing to pay for something like Google Sketchup, which is generally underpowered as a 3D design environment, but has a decent interface to hack a 2D mouse into a 3D environment. We need to get over the idea that 3D interfaces are going to make it big. They will never do that while we are using 2D pointers.

Dear Google,

[ticklejw]

If you're just going to outright shit-can it, why not open-source it? At least then people can benefit from the energy you put into it instead of just throwing that all away.

Re:Dear Google,

[Lodragandraoidh]

Actually that energy would be better spent working on the OpenSim project to improve a well established grid and help solidify standards for interaction between the Second Life grid and other grids, than to waste energy on a dog that doesn't have a fraction of the capabilities already present in the open simulator.

Re:Dear Google,

[dominic.laporte]

There is also the open source virtual world wonderland built in java and based on the (also open source) darkstar

It's not an easy thing to do...

[Max Romantschuk]

I've never tried lively, but I did give Second Life (with it's rather amazing content creation and scripting abilities) a try. The way I see it there's one major obstacle to these worlds: The "ghost town effect".

It's very resource intensive to simulate a 3D world, especially a vast one. Making the world big is eeexpeeensive, and the power required to run an arbitrary world is huge.

With MMORPGs people are paying each month, and a lot of the on screen action relates to NPCs. In something like Second Life every character is a real person with associated lag etc. It's also impossible to optimize a user generated world like a game, which imposes certains limits within a level.

All in all, Second Life at least is a huge world with comparatively small amounts of people scattered all over. The world just doesn't seem "right" when you go exploring, and most areas are empty. Sure, people gather here and there, but overall it feels like the tech just isn't there yet...

Re:It's not an easy thing to do...

[smellsofbikes]

SL ghost-towns for the same reason that so many other VR's, both textual and visual, have.

1. People go there and build a few cool things and then realize that they're social and want to hang out with other people.

2. People don't live there; they only go there when they want to do something interesting. So there aren't people sleeping and eating and *using* all that space that they've created: they're all gathered together in a few small spaces, interacting.

I think that's a fundamental problem -- not even a design problem, just a problem with human psychology -- that makes any non-goal-oriented VR end up as a vast barren wilderness full of abandoned artistic creations, with all the inhabitants hanging out in one place.

And does anyone care?

[NoNeeeed]

It's as if a million voices cried out and then went: "Lively? What's that?"

Seriously, a knock off of Second-Life? What were they thinking. SL is pointless enough, did anyone there really think that this was going to be a goer?

There is this obsession with 3D worlds, computer interfaces, or file managers. People are convinced that just because something is technically more complex and sophisticated that it must be better. People keep telling us that soon we will be using voice controlled 3d AI interfaces, while missing the fact that none of these things actually make life easier. Why should I have to use a 3D world just to talk to someone? Why use a video phone when I just want to talk, not see their face?

Just because voice recognition is more sophisticated than a keyboard doesn't mean that it is intrinsically better.

The TV didn't kill the radio star. No matter how much more technically complex it might be, you can't watch TV while driving the car or walking down the street.

Re:Tag

[salarelv]

http://www.dead.ly/ :D

Re:Deadly

[James_Duncan8181]

"when I play a dope melody. Anything less than the best is a felony."

If we take it as read that Vanilla Ice is not the best, he is in fact heavily dissuading you from continuing to listen.

I tried it...

[SuperCharlie]

I jumped on Lively when it was first announced, set up and furnished a room. The engine was slow but after it loaded it wasnt that bad. The application iteself always felt like an honest Beta, like there was something more to do before it was "real". Navigating around in Lively was a pain at best, users were never allowed to create and upload world items and the biggest issue was that once you finished outfitting a room, well, you had a chat room and that was about all Lively did.

I think they realized that they would either have to put some serious investment into this to make it worth it or drop it. Lively was an outside bet that just didnt pay off.

Microsoft Bob

[argent]

Google has finally had their "Bob". No big deal.

Now if they had let you put avatars into Google Street View and the rest of the Google Earth line-up, that would have been cool.

No, it was Niniane's pet project

[Wee]

Lively was (is?) headed up by Niniane Wang, one of google's hotter engineering types. She used to work at microsoft games, and so was really pushing for a 3-D experience type thing. I personally never saw the point. But Niniane is something of a diva at google, and so she can basically do whatever she wants. Anyone cute, female and employed pre-IPO can pretty much do whatever they want no matter how pointless, come to think of it.

I tried Lively when it was an internal alpha, and just didn't understand the utility of it. I wasn't sure how they were going to monetize it, either. Or what it had to do with anything, really.

I did enjoy going to meetings Niniane held. Her being hot and all.

-B