The Economist reported that Google wanted to bring 3-D virtual worlds to the masses by making them accessible through a web browser.
Though millions of people log into virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft (gaming) and Second Life (social networking) every day, they do require special client software to be downloaded making it daunting to newcomers.
The Google virtual world is called Lively but remains lifeless, hosting a dwindling number of users and prompting a string of negative reviews.
Lively is a simple environment, amounting to little more than a series of 3-D chat rooms.
To enter, you must first download and install a plug-in for your web-browser.
You can then choose from a list of rooms, the most popular of which are (inevitably) themed around sex and dating.
And although some popular rooms—“Love Sweet Love” and “Sexy Babes Club”—have had thousands of visitors, the number quickly drops into the double digits further down the list. Hardly anyone is using Lively.
Why has it been such a flop?
“There’s nothing to do in Lively if you’re not talking to someone,” says Greg Lastowka, an expert on virtual worlds at Rutgers School of Law in New Jersey. Second Life, he says, offers “commerce and creativity”, and Club Penguin (a popular virtual world for children, owned by Disney) has lots of built-in games.
Google denies that it is beaten yet.
Mark Young, a member of the Google Lively team, admits that it has a lot of problems: crashes, log-in difficulties and hard-to-read text. When asked what he hopes to tweak, he says: “Everything. Much of the user interface is not as complete or polished as planned in designs.”
