Mel Guymon
Head of 3D Operations
Google Inc.
Dear Mr. Guymon,
Being a non-native English speaker I can only hope to be fractionally as articulate as the previous poster. Nevertheless, I too feel compelled to address you personally today in an effort to describe to you what Lively means to me. I will do so with no other expectation than you reading my story. What you subsequently do with it, I will leave respectfully to your own discretion.
When I first participated in Lively I knew the phenomenon of virtual worlds only by reading about it. All my professional life I had been involved in "serious" Information Technology. I was a no-nonsense manager making decision based on reasoning and careful calculations. All this 3D and virtual this and that seemed pointless to me. Addictive maybe, but still pointless. A short-lived diversion for hormone-stricken teens maybe, but still pointless.
Being in semi-retirement however I figured it wouldn't harm to indulge in some frivolous exploring of this hyped "brave new virtual world". A few days in Lively turned my world upside down. It soon became addictive indeed, but no longer pointless. With quite a few hormone - stricken teens around looking for a short-lived diversion indeed, but no longer pointless.
What I found in Lively, after scratching the surface as I suspect so many industry pundits stopped short of, was a community of interesting people from all cultures and age groups that I could connect to. This didn't happen overnight, and I didn't realize this overnight either. Being an old-timer in this industry I grew up with IRC, bulletin boards and chat rooms before they were called that way. I professionally participated in forums and mailing lists. They were functional sometimes, a necessity at other times, a waste of time and energy most of the time. Not once had I felt an emotional connection. Being the obsessive analytical mind that I was trained to be, I didn't understand at first why Lively had this effect on me, why I enjoyed being in Lively.
Slowly it dawned on me: Lively is the first conversational environment that makes talking to a person feel like talking to a person. It's an enabling platform. I started investigating other virtual worlds and they all fell short. Without being blind for its shortcomings, I think that only Lively offers this characteristic. What sets it apart is that Lively offers a conversation a sense of place and person. Being able to move around a room to "physically" (as far as the avatar is concerned) join a conversation, or inversely, move away from a conversation, are extremely strong visual clues. The speech ballons help a lot in keeping focused on the participants in a conversation. With the right easy-to-adjust camera angle it's no problem to filter out other conversations in the same room. All this is only possible thanks to Google's implementation of the virtual world concept. For all the criticism that Google received for Lively's execution, this is one thing Google did right, and I thank you for it. Google managed to take the virtual world concept and turn it into the (almost) perfect chat room. Lest I offend my artistic friends in Lively, who have created beautiful works of art, beyond my imagination of what would be possible with the limited resources, I should add to my previous sentence: ... with a lot of spare room (no pun intended) for artistic expression.
You being in the position that you are, I take it you're an adult, mature, business-type alpha male, like me. Have you ever had tears welling in your eyes in a chat room, because of what someone said? Someone you only knew through his/her moniker or avatar?
I have.
Only in Lively.
Please... KEEP LIVELY ALIVE !!
Sincerely,
oriste
http://livelyzens.com
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