This week Google has launched Lively. It is an online tool that allows people to embody a cartoonish online avatar and have text-based conversations with friends and other Internet users in virtual chat rooms. The bloggers and webmasters can also add these rooms to their websites or blogs. It is very much similar to the instant messaging software IMVU and the virtual world Second Life. It is currently only supported on Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, using Windows XP or Windows Vista. Normally online chat rooms are two-dimensional and they include text, voice and video but in Lively you can have three-dimensional chat rooms which is more interactive and full of fun. However there are some limitations, only up to 20 persons can occupy a room and chat with one another. Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa.

This project is being headed by Niniane Wang. She is an engineering manager. She wrote in the blog post that this product is result of “20 percent project,”. Actually this is Google’s philosophy that employees should spend one day a week working on projects outside of their day-to-day responsibilities. Meanwhile, students at Arizona State University have been testing Lively chat rooms before the official launch.

If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator’s interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar’s look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text “hug”. Prior to this release, we worked closely with Arizona State University. Based on feedback from ASU students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Niniane Wang, an engineering manager at Google who headed this project.

I also tried their chat rooms. It seems to be a poor carbon copy of Second Life. I found most of the rooms crowded. Also, Google should take some action to control the porn activities in the chat rooms. To know more about Google’s Lively watch this video.