It was a surprisingly lightly attended session that initiated Austin GDC's WorldsInMotion virtual worlds focused conference track - surprising because you'd imagine that the entrance of a company with the massive resources and cultural ubiquity as only Google has would be just the sort of disruption that would threaten to set the industry on end.
While product manager Mel Guymon wasn't able to make his scheduled speech, creative director Kevin Hanna gave no less a revealing look into the future of Lively, Google's recently debuted web-embeddable 3D virtual world.
Most importantly, Hanna quietly announced that while you can currently embed any Google Gadget into Lively's world – such as YouTube videos or weather reports running on virtual TVs - the company will soon be providing an API for developers to create new interactive gadgets to run in the space.
Massively is running a story about Google's short-lived virtual environment, Lively. The article examines why Lively shut down so quickly, and how its simplicity and its attempts at user-friendliness did more harm than good. Quoting:
"The idea here is that any interactive system has a certain amount of complexity, usually involving the number and type of tasks which can be performed. Obviously, it is detrimental if the interaction interface is more complicated than it needs to be. That just makes things harder. What's a little less obvious is that reducing the complexity of the interaction interface too far makes things harder as well. Either it makes it hard to perform the tasks, or it reduces the number of tasks which can be performed. ... ideally the interaction interface needs to be of an order of complexity that is coupled to the order of complexity of the number and type of possible tasks. If it rises above that or falls below that, performing tasks becomes harder. Performing tasks with an oversimplified interaction-interface is like trying to make coffee with one hand tied behind your back. Overcomplicating it is like trying to instruct five people to build a shed, when none of you have any language in common."
Google has decided to pull the plug its virtual world Lively after less than five months.
The company admitted that taking a gamble on creating an online social networking space has not paid off, and the network will be canned at the end of the year.
GamesIndustry.biz caught up with creative director Kevin Hanna just hours before he was due for his flight back home. While he artfully dodged the question when asked if Google itself had internal games projects in the works, that the company remains heavily invested in X-Ray Kid - the self-professed "games studio" behind Lively staffed with former Warner Brothers, Disney, EA, Sony, Marvel Entertainment, and Microsoft talent - is perhaps telling in itself.
In this wide-ranging interview, Hanna talks about his own background in the industry, the precise nature of the relationship between Google and X-Ray Kid and overseas vendors, why virtual world sceptics should care about Lively.
