Lively vs Second Life
With the launch of Google’s Lively, the fully immersible virtual world becomes a mainstream experience, though Second Life got there first. Lively’s a whole new level of networking—an interactive, 3D meshing of ‘real life’ with your virtual presence. It’s got text, audio, video... But one ‘new medium’ had precisely these attributes earlier: computer games. So, what makes Lively so different?
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Lively is the other end of the spectrum from the 3D immersive Secondlife virtual world where you move through a fully rendered space somewhat continuously. Lively is thin and disconnected and not as engaging--but easier to start using. In fact it looks like sorta training ground for virtual worlds. But issue in fact for virtual worlds is not about the present, but about the future. Google is the biggest force on the internet, so we can imagine that this step can be followed by more horsepower, or not as Google also seems to have a lot of half started things knocking around it's technosphere. We made a little list of the upcoming platforms here http://rezzable.com/blog/rightasrain-rimbaud/virtual-world-platforms-watch-list .
rightasrain