Conventional text-based chat is soooooo yesterday’s news, you know. At least, that’s what Internet search giant Google Inc. wants you to believe thanks to the introduction of Lively, an online chat application that enables its users to waffle through ambitious cartoon-styled 3D avatars.
Google launches Lively, its 3D chat application. Image: Google.
Revealed to the world yesterday on Google’s official blog, the Lively tool is a beta project creation pushed out by Google Labs and arrives as a free download that users can explore to create not only their personal avatar but also their own 3D personal chat room environments -- which can then be added to any blog or Web site.
Lively’s distinctly interactive and customisation-friendly cartoon world could possibly redefine how online users chat socially to one another by providing a marked departure from the usual online chat delivery system, which sees users conversing via simple text windows or through voice and video-based applications such as Skype.
In practice, Lively allows up to 20 personal avatar representations to mingle in a single user-crafted chat room, with conversation text appearing through comic book speech bubbles that are connected back to whichever avatar is talking.
And, true to its name, the Lively experience also has its personal appeal widened somewhat further by Google leveraging its YouTube video-sharing service and Picasa photo-sharing service so that members can run video clips on virtual TVs and hang images on the walls of their rooms.
Beyond the rather simple but attractive mechanic of text chat via colourful avatars and personally designed rooms, Lively also offers a welcome alternative to the ever-annoying emoticon icon system used in standard text chats to convey emotion. Indeed, Lively users will actually be able to watch as their avatars interact with one another based on the user’s directions. For example, rather than merely receiving a virtual hug via text “[[hug]]”, Lively users can watch their avatar actually being hugged by another user’s avatar.
The Lively project is the brainchild of Niniane Wang, an engineering manager at Google, who came up with the idea after deciding the social Web was far too static and needed livening up through more fun expression, 3D graphics, and real-time avatar interactions.
After being extensively tested by students at the University of Arizona, the Lively application is now available in its public beta stage and works directly through the host computer’s Web browser after a small software download. Presently, access to Lively is restricted to computers running with a Windows operating system.
Lively is not alone in opening its interactive chat doors this week, with California-based virtual-world-start-up Vivaty also going live on Tuesday. Vivaty arrives offering personalised 3D chat room access through social network Facebook and also AOL’s Instant Messenger chat application.
View blog reactions
There are currently no comments for this article. Be the first to comment! (no registration required)
Advertising
There are currently no comments for this article. Be the first to comment! (no registration required)