I came across an advert in a magazine I normally read and I thought I would give google lively a look through. What Lively did here isn’t anything new.. but the concept is neat. Basically they are chat “rooms” people can participate in with avatars that you actually control. This feature is nothing new in itself, but the great thing about those “rooms” are that you place them on your website. What? Well here’s the deal. You place the code on your site and people with the Lively client installed can join that room and talk to people who also visit that website. This feature is very cool. I however haven’t had time to create my own room, or really give the chat concept a full look through, but the idea is pretty neat.
Screenshots and my thoughts on the thing are in the post.
Well I gave lively a 2 hour look. The avatars were a bit hard to move around, but once I got used to it and actually started talking, I found it pretty nice. The best feature was using that avatars to show who you were primarily talking with. The room I joined was a “coffee house” and they had a lounge set up. Instantly people greeted me and asked me to have a seat.. this was as easy as clicking on the chair and clicking on one of the spots available to me. If you click a spot with someone already in it, you can sit in there lap even. lol.
Well I learned the interface rather quickly but found that the chat log was always needed to be opened to really keep track of what was going on. There were speech bubbles but it was hard to keep track of who was talking to who. The chat log itself was rather ugly. The spacing was completely wrong and whenever you typed, it showed up with your name on the right side instead of the left… no no.
I would have liked to see the log more like a traditional IRC log, with your name a different color to stand out. Colors remind me: Every person is assigned a text color. This is actually nice for remembering who is who, if someone is talking across the room and you dont want to change your camera view.
The characters themselves were interesting. There was the “Bratz” looking females with absolutly no body and giant eyes and a head. There were regular females and skinny guys. Those were all fine and dandy, but I chose a cat…At this time there were three animals you could chose from besides realistic characters.. a cat, a “bear” that looked more like a meerkat, and a pig which came with a straw hat for ultra farming skills.
Each character also comes with a outfit. Unfortunately only certain people are allowed to make outfits (I am guessing to keep people from making porn or something offensive) and I chose bondage for my cat. As usual, I wasn’t contempt with just using the software as it was intended.. Instead of having a seat, I chose to sit on top of a lamp, like a good kitty.
Here’s some screen caps I gathered:
