It seems that Google wants a piece of the VR (virtual reality) revenue pie oh so famously milked to its bare skin and bones by Second Life, by introducing the new Google Lively (beta, of course!)

From the website meta-description:

Chat and hangout with your friends in rooms you design and customize your avatar. Experience another dimension of the web with Lively by Google.

Lively’s features include the following:

• Create your own virtual space

  Chat and interact with your friends in rooms you design

• Express yourself

  Customize your avatar and stream personal photos and video

• Add your room to your site

  Invite your friends to chat and help decorate

Google may have has also embraced the popular torrent based distribution method by providing a 450kb download, which is what I believe to be a torrent downloader. Note that this is just my unconfirmed hunch. After all, the mighty Google has all the bandwidth in the world to spare, and then some.

Of course, creating an account is easy as 1-2-3. If you already have a GMail account, all you have to do is sign in to the Google Lively website and it’s activated.

I have a few gripes about it though, mainly:

• It runs inside a browser window, which consumes a lot of resources. You can make it “pop out” of the window though, but you still need to load the browser to enter a room thus consuming resources that would otherwise be unnecessary. Firefox3 registered a whopping 160 megabytes of RAM usage though I have a bunch of tabs and a few add-ons loaded, including Firebug.
• On my connection, it really takes a while for a room to “Materialize”. I spent at least 10 minutes loading a room on my first try
• It is not obvious if a room is full, because it gets stuck in the loading screen where it says “Materialize” and unless you happen to glance at the small text at the bottom telling you the room is full, you’d be waiting indefinitely!
• Even when you’re already in a room, the “Room Materializing” message will sometimes appear and take up 10% of your screen
• No full screen mode?
• No WSAD movement?

So much for my first impression, huh? Well, take note that these are merely my first impressions from playing around with it for about 10 minutes. I have yet to explore the game (OMG!) to its entirety.

On the up side you got the following:

• Really cute and customizable avatars! (check out the screenshots contained in this post)
• The ability to create your own rooms. Total privacy in the VR world.
• Internet is only for one thing: PRON! The #1 room right now based on the all rooms list is like a SEX room. Go figure.
• …
• …
• …
• PORN!!!

Given Google’s tight policies on indexing adult material, I wonder what kind of censorship will be implemented? What kind of restrictions will they put in place and how will they police the VR world? Will there be GM’s like in MMOGs? If so then GG to them, for the backlash from the public, as can be observed in all VR worlds, will be harsh. Only time will tell until the public forms a general opinion about the service. GGG (Good Game Google!)

Ready to get into the Google world? Download the Lively installer now and join me in my room

Dont’ forget to check out the official video too! As for me I’m heading back to playing with my furry cat-like avatar thingy on Google Lively.

Peace.

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