The Internet giant is announcing a free service that lets users create simulated rooms and visit them as customizable, animated forms called avatars. It is a model that was pioneered by Linden Lab's Second Life service, which attracted wide attention but failed to sustain an early phase of furious growth.
One criticism of existing virtual worlds is that they are separate services and users can't easily move among them. Google's offering, called Lively, attempts to address that issue by allowing users to create virtual rooms that can be embedded in Web sites and blogs.
Visitors to such rooms also can view videos and other content running on other Web sites such as Google's YouTube, a feature not typically possible on some other services. "We feel it is fully integrated with the Web," said Sara Jew-Lim, a Google spokeswoman.
Like other services, however, users have to download and install a special piece of software in addition to a Web browser, and their PCs also need what Google describes as a "decent" video card, with 32 megabytes of video memory. The virtual spaces and avatars created with Lively will be hosted on Google's server systems -- not on the servers run by other users or companies, like a built-in part of a Web page.
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One criticism of existing virtual worlds is that they are separate services and users can't easily move among them. Google's offering, called Lively, attempts to address that issue by allowing users to create virtual rooms that can be embedded in Web sites and blogs.
Visitors to such rooms also can view videos and other content running on other Web sites such as Google's YouTube, a feature not typically possible on some other services. "We feel it is fully integrated with the Web," said Sara Jew-Lim, a Google spokeswoman.
Like other services, however, users have to download and install a special piece of software in addition to a Web browser, and their PCs also need what Google describes as a "decent" video card, with 32 megabytes of video memory. The virtual spaces and avatars created with Lively will be hosted on Google's server systems -- not on the servers run by other users or companies, like a built-in part of a Web page.
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