Serendipity35

Two headlines from the virtual world...

First, from the blog of Second Life comes words that Linden Labs and IBM Teleport Across Virtual Worlds. Linden Labs, the creators of virtual world Second Life, and IBM announced that they have achieved the first recorded teleport of their avatars from one virtual world into another.Sounds like something out of Star Trek. Researchers from the two companies teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid to an OpenSim virtual world without logging out of one world and logging in to the other.

Apparently, they have been working on this type of thing since last fall and author Nick Carr had half-seriously wondered if World of Warcraft avatars could attack and conquer parts of Second Life if they were allowed to pass from world to world.

One possible point of interest in all this for educators is that as virtual worlds slowly make their way into classrooms, interoperability across virtual worlds will become critical. For Second Life, it will help them maintain the viability of SL as an increasing number of virtual worlds become available. I'm not convinced that SL will be the platform for educators, but it may be one of them. The portability of users and digital assets will be important to creators.

In some ways, it reminds me of the CMS wars. Second Life is WebCT/Blackboard - the big commercial player with a strong foothold. But coming along are "open source" worlds that will compete and may look more attractive to educational institutions - the Moodles of virtual worlds.

Speaking of which, reading Niniane Wang's (Engineering Manager at Google) post on their house blog, I see that they have launched their own virtual world project.

...I'm excited to announce today's release of Lively by Google - a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs.

The Lively team wants to help people experience another dimension of the web. We hope you will use the product to express yourself with and without words, and to do this in the places you already visit on the web.

If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text “[[hug]]”.

Prior to this release, we worked closely with Arizona State University. Based on feedback from ASU students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Better yet, the gadgets you have in your Lively rooms can also run on your desktop.

To learn more about Lively, please visit www.lively.com. Lively is available through a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer and is Windows only for now.

Lively is not a "world" like Second Life but instead splits the space into different rooms. It runs completely in the browser and you use your Google account to log in and create your own avatars, interact with other users, watch YouTube clips on virtual TVs, share your own photos etc. It's pretty cool that the rooms can be easily embedded into any web page.

Creating rooms is fairly simple using a number of templates to get started. For now, all virtual items for Lively are for free. Moving avatars around the rooms is clunky (you have to drag them through the room) and SL users may find the rooms and limitations restrictive at this early stage. I only played for a hour or so in it, but I couldn't fly or interact much except for chat. The rooms and avatars generally look more like videogame graphics than the rich SL locations at this point.

There have been rumors for awhile that Google was planning something like this in Google Earth, and it would be exciting to think that these rooms might be able to move into the Google Earth world in some way.

Google posted a rather unimpressive Lively video in YouTube, but it will give you a sense of how these rooms and avatars look now, or check out some of the popular rooms.