The last two days two news dominated the virtual worlds scene. Google announced the launch of the ‘virtual world’ Lively and Linden Lab announced together with IBM, that they have reached the point, where they could teleport from the Second Life grid to an openSim Grid.

What have these two news in common and what does it mean for the future? Some people are already asking the question if the popular approach of Lively - creating light-weighted applications as plugins/addons for the browser to have rooms/scenes embedded on websites and especially on social networks like Facebook - or if a much more coherent world approach like Second Life will be successful in the long run.

Here are my musings regarding this questions.

Is there a big difference between Second Life and Lively?

Quite a few people called Lively at first “Second Life killer” and others pointed out, that Lively hasn’t much in common with Second Life. Please allow me to compare them from a special perspective:

As somebody who has spent a lot of time already in many virtual worlds and also MMOs I am convinced that this coherent world aspect doesn’t play a very big role and the fact, that approaches like Lively “only” has rooms/scenes doesn’t matter much - especially if you take the proceedings regarding interoperability into account.

Interoperability - That’s for me the really important point here, which makes the differences, brings this two news nicely together and allows me to look at this topic from a special perspective.

Example Second Life: people normally don’t walk or fly from location to location. They teleport and arrive instantly where they want to be. And even if they arrive at a bigger location, you still offer them again easy to use teleports to move around this area. From what I have experienced in the past years, people don’t tend to walk around a lot and what you see again and again is that there are crowds very close to the point where they appear after the teleport.

In my eyes you could even argue, that Second Life is also just a very huge collection of rooms/scenes/locations, which itself aren’t really big and which get they traffic more than 90% via teleport.

Of course there are cases, where areas are bigger and people also explore this areas and walk around more than in average - but in the end - even a single Sim, which is not connected to other sims - is also just a big scene in which they walk around and then teleport away again to the next scene.

Therefore - is Lively not also a virtual world?

I’ve set the quotation marks at the beginning around ‘virtual world’ regarding Lively, because for many people it’s not a virtual world. It’s a 3D avatar based instant messenger, maybe a social 3D environment, but in no way a ‘real’ virtual world. I don’t agree with that.

I had a short discussion on Twitter today about that - and in my eyes Lively not only meet all the criterias, which have been very well described here, for a virtual world, it’s even pretty similar (apart from one aspect: user created content) from the perspective how people use this platforms.

Lively also has a collection of different scenes - like Second Life - which are also connected with each other. At the moment you can chose between different rooms via the website and I am sure, that in the future it will also be possible to link rooms with each other, so that you teleport from one scene to another.

But how to find other scenes? The same way the majority finds new locations/scenes in Second Life: by direct teleports, links on the web, recommendation and of course search! Oh wait - search - Lively is from Google right

For me Lively can also be labeled ‘virtual world’ and if maybe for us professionals it makes a difference and maybe it’s even useful to have more granular differentiations between those approaches, for the users it will in the end make no big difference at all.

They have an avatar, they are in a 3D environment, they are there together with other, with whom they can chat and do things together, it’s a persistent environment, they can move between different scenes/places - both: public and private places - and they have the freedom to do what they want.

Both developments bring us closer to the Metaverse

I like to use the term “Metaverse” for what will be there in a few years - Lively, the involvement of Google and the recent proceedings in openSim interoperability are for me very nice examples how this all can fit together. As described in detail in my post - one metaverse - different visual layers - I really see the metaverse as a collection of different platforms and especially different interfaces to access an three dimensional, avatar based environment.

For me platforms like Lively and Vivaty or technologies like Flash and Unity are all ways to create web based interfaces for the metaverse. And platforms like Second Life will maybe be the tools we use, to create a much more immersive and even more coherent interface for it.

But in the end all those scenes/rooms/locations will have different levels of interoperability - people will teleport from one scene to another and maybe even change interfaces on their way. And that’s again also the point where data portability in virtual worlds will play a big role

Example: maybe my journey starts in an embedded scene on Facebook and after a chat about something else which is going on I will teleport with some friends to a another scene - maybe a kind of event - which will start a new interface (can be a separate client software, can be in integrated in the browser or maybe even in the operating system) - but in the end what I do is to teleport from one scene to another.

All these scenes - independent of the used platforms and the available interfaces - will be connected - not only by the possibility to move between them, but also by being an integrated part of the internet, which means that they might use the same data sources, that they will access common services, that they will allow data to move between them and of course that they will be indexed by Google, like websites are today (btw. Second Life already uses Google technology for their search)

I really like the fact, that Google starts to be a part of this development, because I hope that they can also contribute and accelerate the development not only with Lively, but also with their engagement regarding data portability, open social and other important developments, which influence already the social web.