Lively

I’ve never been a good blogger. I always get distracted and end up not having the time to write posts. I get distracted a lot.

I got a job about a month ago. I answer the telephone for various limo companies from all around the country (and one in Canada!). The problem is that you never know if the calls will come in slow or fast. Right now, I’ve only had a few calls, and I’m an hour and a half into my shift. Not that that’s too bad. I’d rather have slow than ridiculously busy. With the relatively large amount of downtime I have at work, I realized that I now have time to blog on a daily basis. I’ll even try to blog during the two days a week I have off!

Now on to the main topic of the post. Yesterday, Google announced Lively. It’s basically an embeddable 3D chat room. You can get a bunch of stuff to decorate the room, allow (or disallow) visitors to change your room. Right now, there’s a small, but fairly diverse number of objects you can put in your room.

Unfortunately, right now Lively is very much a beta. It only works with IE and Firefox on Windows. It also has a bad habit of not working. Every time I tried, Lively crashed Firefox 3 on my Windows Vista computer. It worked (mostly) fine in Internet Explorer. Also, there are some mild problems with object collision that can get you a bit stuck if you aren’t careful. It can also be hard to walk around the rooms. You can get anywhere by double-clicking on the spot you want to go to, but it would feel like a more natural world if it were easier to just walk around. To do that right now, you have to click and drag your avatar’s shadow. Too bad the shadow doesn’t show up all the time (again, object collision problems I think).

The main problem with Lively right now is customization. There just isn’t a whole lot of it. Individuals can’t create their own objects for their room. You are limited to a small number of room shapes. The objects you can use aren’t customizable, and, particularly bad, the rooms can’t be re-colorized or anything like that. This makes for a bunch of fairly generic rooms. Until you can get your own stuff into Lively, it will simply languish and not really be good for anything.

Hopefully Google will catch on to the problems with their new service and allow us to make things. We already have the 3D tools needed in SketchUp, all we need now is a way to upload (and script objects.)