I’ve always wondered why they didn’t combine SketchUp with Earth, integrating a sort of communication/avatar “manifold” to create a virtual world.
Lively seems to betray Google’s lack of understanding of virtual worlds. It’s not really the 3d chatroom feature that draws people to it. It’s the collaborative elements, content-creation, and also its ability to be as open-ended as the real world, so that people would stay in it to do basically everything. Lively seems only a slightly more graphical version of IMVU. And yet, since it’s from Google, everyone falls in love with it at first sight as if it’s the emperor’s new coat…
This Shakespearean Theatre Company’s artistic director says to the big G, “More matter and less hype!”
