Last week I talked a bit about Vivaty - lots of potential there. Oddly enough, the same day that I discovered Vivaty, I also discovered a new Google feature called Lively, which is essentially a 3D chat room that you can build yourself. On some basic levels it is very similar to Vivaty - it’s browser-based and doesn’t have require much from your computer. It’s 3D, and you can choose and decorate a room with a wide variety of items, from chairs and desks to lava lamps. The avatars are less life-like than in Vivaty, but you can do a lot more customizing with them in terms of hair style and color, clothing, shoes, etc. The rooms themselves vary widely - in Vivaty you’re choosing between a small variety of ‘hip’ locales. In Lively, there are normal rooms, oddly shaped rooms (one is shaped like a cat), outdoor scenes (like a graveyard) and just way out there scenes (like an asteroid floating in space).

Chatting on Lively is pretty straightforward - just like regular IM, only the words appear in bubbles over your head. It recognizes some terms and keywords, as well as question marks, so when you ask a question your avatar kind of shrugs their shoulders. When you say “lol” or a variety of other words regarding laughter, your avatar busts up laughing, which is cute and funny, at least the first fifteen times. I put a computer monitor on my asteroid (as you can see in the pic), but the best i can do with it is make it link to a video, so when visitors click on the monitor, the video opens in a new window. I don’t like that as much - but given the size of the monitor it wouldn’t be very practical to play the video on that screen. One way I can imagine doing it is when you click on a screen with a video, have the ‘camera’ POV kind of zoom in to watch what’s on the screen - similar to what you can do in Vivaty.

One thing I worry a bit about is people doing or saying things that are inappropriate in a room that I’ve made. You can have up to 20 people in your room at the same time, chatting with each other, hugging, laughing, back-flipping, etc. If you want to have a private conversation with someone, you choose “whisper” when you talk with them, and this hides your conversation from others. You can also “ignore” someone who is being an idiot, and report people who are violating Google’s terms of service. If I was going to use Lively as a librarian, I’d want to limit my visitors to one at a time, and other people couldn’t watch (right now, you can have 20 people in the room, with up to 100 watching) or some kind of waiting area, or I suppose, 10 librarian avatars all whispering (and shushing? Can I shush people in there?) to up to 10 information seekers.

Quite a few different rooms have been built already, with some standard chat room environments like a high school cafeteria, or the mall - stuff like that. Other rooms are less about where they are than what they’re for - quite a few of the rooms have the word ’sex’ in the title, for example. The most consistently popular room so far is “I Hate Ewoks.”

As a tool, again I have to say that it’s a really interesting evolution of the Internet environment, and shows some of the possibilities of what lies ahead for the Internet. As 3D gets easier to do, as standards settle in, as users discover what they like and don’t like, as early adopters tweak things and try new things and add their own mods to things, I think we’ll see a lot more of these types of environments appearing as parts of existing web pages, just like we are now seeing IM boxes on web pages, easily embedded video, and all kinds of things that used to be really difficult to pull off becoming totally normal.

In terms of libraries, again we can imagine a 3D library, or in this case, perhaps a 3D locale where people can ask a Virtual Librarian questions. Lots of libraries are already doing IM and chat reference, and as the Internet evolves toward more 3D environments, libraries will be right there to help people out.

Browser-based 3D virtual environments were big last week - my favorite so far is called Vivaty.  Think Second Life without all the operating system requirements.  It’s probably unfair to compare Vivaty to Second Life, because Second Life is this massive online world, and Vivaty is just a little 3D room that you can create or visit, but the look and feel is pretty similar, so it’s a good reference point.  I was very excited when i saw what was promised by Vivaty and immediately dove in.

First off - at this time you can only use Vivaty in IE so far - no Firefox yet, though they say it should be up and running in a couple weeks.  Right on.

In Vivaty you get to pick from a set of environments:  houses, lofts, beachhouses, boats, stuff like that.  Your room is automatically loaded with funky looking furniture, pictures on the wall, television sets, shelves, vases, etc.  You pick an avatar from a set of about 20 (I haven’t been able to figure out how to customize this person yet - I don’t know that it’s possible yet).  Any object you see is customizable - you can change the fabric that your couch is made of, or the pattern on the picture frames, the color of your room moldings, etc.  That’s nice and all, but what’s really cool is that you can make the television sets play whatever youtube video you want - so I made one of them play one of my One Minute Critic videos:

I picked the fabric for that couch, btw.  Pretty sweet, I know.  Theoretically, you can set videos to autoplay or loop, but so far all my videos autoplay when i enter my room and I haven’t been able to make them not autoplay.  If I only had one tv in the place it wouldn’t be obnoxious, but I have 8, and 6 of them are different music videos.  Cacophony!  I sent off a letter to Vivaty asking for help on that point, and they replied (within a day) that this was a known glitch that they are working to remedy.

Anyway, you can have the tv screen display a photo of your choice when the video isn’t playing.  One of the things I’d like to be able to do is make the television play a series of youtube videos, like a youtube player, and/or have channels on the tv, with different things on each channel.  Like a real tv.  Right now, i think you can only do one video.

Another neat thing about it is that it’s made to be entered through Facebook (or AIM), so you can display your room on your facebook page, invite facebook friends, and give them (and yourself) an easy way to find your room.

Other things I want to be able to do:  add a wider variety of web-linked stuff, like book-cases to show my worldcat booklists, a coffee table where i can set up a game of scrabulous, or maybe a  sweet jukebox with a ton of albums to scroll through and set in motion, via someplace like last.fm.

Oh, btw - you can make your avatar clap, jump for joy, laugh, give a thumbs up or down - on your keyboard, the number keys each represent one of those actions.

So, lots of promise in Vivaty, and hopefully the kinks will get worked out soon.  I’m excited about Vivaty because it’s connected to the rest of the Internet - so instead of it being a separate destination from the Internet, it’s more of a lens through which to view the Internet, very much like a facebook or myspace page, all folded up like an origami house.  If Vivaty can play well with other social sites, I think it could be a real interesting development in the future of the Internet.  Imagine a 3D library with browseable shelves, displays, videos, google maps, chat reference, co-browsing the Internet, etc.