Lively reminds me of something like IMVU, an instant messaging program that enables 3D avatar chat, in that it provides off-the-shelf avatars with teen appeal for socialising. It's a pretty simple: it's about chatting in rooms that can be customised to reflect your taste, and is nothing like as grandiose as something like Second Life or There. It's not a single persistent world, but a bunch of ad hoc virtual spaces that let people come together and show off their avatar identity through chatting and flirting.

One thing Google doesn't do is bet against the web, and as you'd expect Lively is firmly web-based: it runs in your browser after you've downloaded an applet (if you're lucky – it keeps crashing my browsers). The idea of a 3D experience that can be easily built and accessed via the web, rather than some huge downloadable client is a solid one. It's one of the principles behind virtual world heavy-weight Ralph Koster's company, Metaplaces. However, Metaplaces has much grander ambitions, and wants to provide web-based tools that will scale from simple games to rich virtual worlds: according to its website, “We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play everything, from anywhere.”

Google's Lively team seem to want you to, uh, hang around in some cool online chat rooms and exchange virtual hugs. To be honest, the whole thing seems a bit underwhelming. Its launch reminds me a bit of Google's social network site, Orkut. This was another project, like Lively, that was developed by a Google employee in part of the “20 per cent time” devoted to individual pet projects, and another one that has not really set the world alight. Orkut is a perfectly respectable online community, but of course something of an also-ran in a world now dominated by My Space and Facebook.

For now, Lively is what we've got: that's the science fact. However, given Google's extraordinary scale and the immense possibilities created by its huge web audience, I can't help thinking more along the lines of science fiction, imagining where Google could take this technology and do something really interesting with it.

Google embraces virtual worlds with 3D chat tool

Lively will allow online conversations to become realistic as users 'sit down' with one another in a virtual environment

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  Michael Parsons

Google has at least two unique advantages in the virtual world space. The first is the extraordinary power of its search engine. The problem of trying to find something in a virtual world is not unlike the problem of finding something in the real world. The Onion did a great gag story about Google planes bombing the last remaining things in the world that were not in its search engine, but the gag wouldn't work for a Google virtual world, because in a virtual world every atom of creation exists digitally and is in theory locatable by search. As worlds get richer and more intricate, Google strikes me as the best possible entity to help you find stuff, whether you're searching in San Francisco or Second Life.

The second unique advantage is Google Earth. This is already an amazing creation, a mirror world of incredible richness available free on most PCs. You can already see the planet from space, dive down to the street level and see incredible detail in 360-degree panoramas. You can already build your own 3D buildings and add them to Google Earth, and Google continues to add more content to this remarkable piece of software.

However, imagine if Google Earth became a portal to other virtual spaces. If you were in business mode, you could fly in via Google Earth to check the name of that company whose building you keep driving past, find its real-world buildings, use them to launch its webpage, and then enter its Lively virtual space to interact with some real employees. As a tourist, you could fly into New York, check out the hotels in the area near where your friends live, and then fly your avatar into the hotel's Lively space to talk to someone about getting a deal on a weekend break.

Google Earth comes alive because it's a living, breathing online community which uses the power of social networks to layer value onto a planet simulation. You enter a 3D space but can then easily locate and activate 2D web information, such as pictures or Wikipedia entries. It's this integration of 2D and 3D which is so powerful, and Google, which dominates the world's text-based information and has hell of a leg up in 3D via Google Earth, seems to me well placed to create the ultimate mash-up of real and virtual world content. It will be interesting to see how Lively develops, but for now, we don't need another stand alone virtual space: the real magic will happen when these worlds start to collide.

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Michael Parsons helped to launch The Industry Standard magazine, and was the launch Editor of CNET.co.uk