The 31st of December 2008 marked the end of Google Lively. Lively was perhaps one of the most eagerly anticipated virtual worlds projects of recent years. Many felt that the presence of Google in the virtual worlds space in itself validated the field. However in its beta release state was generally regarded as a disappointment. Google announced its retirement of the project on the 19th of November 2008. 

I helped out on the Google Lively trusted content developer program, so I was very disappointed to see the announcement of its retirement. I felt that Lively was interesting, despite its limitations and had potential as a different type of virtual world platform ( in comparison to more immersive highly customisable worlds like Second Life™ ). Here is a machinima video I made recently of what Lively looked like and some of the rooms created in it. :

However I logged in to Lively today ( 1st Jan 2009 ) to find it mysteriously open and running. This may just be due to Google staff being on holiday. Another theory being discussed in Lively rooms, is that Google have decided to no longer maintain Lively after 2008, but still allow it to run. ( EDIT : Google Lively is indeed now closed as of the 2nd Jan 2009 )

The real surprise came as I wandered and stumbled upon a series of users in there frantically talking about “NewLively“. 
 

After trawling around the sparsely populated NewLively googlegroup I wasn’t any wiser as to the origin of this project or who was running it. Wild speculation was flying around in the Google Lively room I was in that Google had sold the source code to Lively to a third party. This would have been reasonably big news, so I emailed Niniane Wang at Google, former head of the Lively project. Niniane assured me that “Google did not sell source code to newlively.  It was made by lively fans.”
 

With some trepidation I went to the site and downloaded and installed the NewLively client. The registration / log on procedure doesnt use gmail at all, in fact I logged in using a seperate email altogether. I logged in, and joined a room and luckily found Liu YiChang, the leader of the NewLively project there. He confirmed that NewLively is rebuilt from the ground up and whilst it looks and feels very similar to Lively, it is in fact built on different technology. NewLively is apparently a company, with 10 people working on this project, but as Liu stated “it is a side project at the moment”.  

“We recreated everything, the code and the models”, Liu said “it was a huge task, in the last month the team and I have slept only 4 hours a night.” I asked him if anyone at Google was aware of what they were doing and if he thought there would be any legal issues regarding the NewLively project. “Yes, they are aware of what we are doing. I don’t think they will object, I think they will like it. Google is a great company. Our work stands on the shoulders of the great work the Google Lively team did.” Liu is based in Beijing, China. However the servers for NewLively are in both the US and China. “We have great servers. Also many interested sponsors have been in contact with us.”

When I asked Liu what his longer term aims were with this project he replied “About one month ago, I heard the news that lively was shutting down. I was very sad. I have many friends there. So I made a decision. I had to do something for the lively users. We decided to clone lively. So, the first step is to making a place for Lively users . In the longer term it will be something between Google Lively and Second Life. Users will be able to generate some content, for example users will be able to upoad photos, music, video, even avatars and rooms. We have a great advantage over Second Life in the supported concurrent users per server. We use better technology. We estimate that we can support about 5000 users per server, better than most other virtual worlds services.”      

This concurrency claim, would if verifiable present a virtual world platform that brought a different level of viability to events in virtual worlds. The possibility of an online pop concert with thousands rather than tens of users is something which the music / events industry has been very interested in for some time now. Aside from Second Life, where concerts have been one of the key use cases, this has even spawned a number of specialist virtual world platforms specifically for this purpose, most notably vSide and the intriguing Music Mogul.

I asked Liu what how their platform supports sound, if it is uploaded and stored on the servers then sent back out to the client ?  or if it can be linked to files hosted elsewhere on the web. “We support 3d sound.” he replied, “Yes both, but we prefer external links”

Liu was also keen to stress other features which the platform can support, including 3d stereoscopic viewer capabilties and “game rooms”. Which may allude to the earlier claims from Google to allow Lively to be opened up as a game development platform. It will be interesting to see how this project develops, if it has an affect on Google’s strategy and if it provides an interesting alternative to other virtual world platforms. 

Update  20:19 GMT 01/01/09 :

There has been thread running on the Livelyzens Googlegroup about this, with some interesting comments. 

http://groups.google.com/group/livelyzens/browse_thread/thread/c5197c51d7133be0/56cae806e1a806a6?hl=en#56cae806e1a806a6

It seem’s the technology of the viewer stems from this site ( which isn’t viewable in English ) :

http://cc6.com/