I'd like to call for a brief moment of silence in the virtual worlds community to commemorate the passing of 'Ruth' -- the prototypic SL loading avatar.

A bit of history for those for whom the term 'Ruthed' has no resonance: In Second Life, when you enter a sim via teleport or by logging in, the sim needs to assemble your avatar for display -- in the process, accessing and applying your shape (followed by other worn inventory: skin, clothing, hair, attachments) -- the stuff and parameters that make you uniquely you. Without your shape, you're Ruth: the prototypic avatar, a medium-height, mesomorphic female with a brown mullet.

Ideally, nobody was ever supposed to see Ruth. But in practice, SL folks saw her pretty often. There's be some rez or teleport-landing flakeout, shape application would lag, and there you'd be: a short, small-breasted, bad-haired, dwarf version of yourself, wearing your primo skin and high-fashion clothing. Usually, the system would fix you after a while -- you'd suddenly inflate to full size and pulchritude. Sometimes you'd have to give the system a kick by clicking Appearance, forcing it to apply your shape. And sometimes, there was just no cure -- you were trapped as Ruth for hours, perhaps through relog after relog. The most uncanny Ruth scenarios involved failures preventing _other_ avatars from caching your shape. So you'd look normal to yourself, but be Ruthed to other people until _they_ relogged.

Now, as of SL 1.20, Ruth has been replaced (as a default, anyway) by a glowing particle mist. Which is a terrific solution (go Brent Linden!) But I do find myself happy that, under Character controls, they've preserved an avenue back to Ruth for those that want or need it. I strongly suspect the reason for this has nothing to do with nostalgia -- the 1.20 client is probably doing some sleight-of-hand to make Ruth inviso, and swapping in the particle mist as it would an inbound TP 'poofer.' But if something fouls up, the mist gives no indication of what's going on ... it's not your avatar, it's just _there_ until your shape hits and the sim thinks you're fit to show. So there are good debugging reasons for keeping plain old Ruth (and she _is_ plain) in reserve. Long may she wave. Those wishing a dose of (hysterical) nostalgia may want to look at this Flickr photostream of Ruth pics.

Meanwhile, 1.20 has also given us lip-sync -- so now our lips move when we use SL voice. This is actually pretty good -- it's going to make presenting somewhat more appealing, and may hugely inflect the usability of avatar video, which (with unmoving avatar faces) was death to watch.

This evening, we spent an hour with Mark Young and Greg Spencer, two of the chief architects of Google Lively, talking about Lively tech, UI, and Google's plans for opening the service to user-generated content. In addition to our lively crew in Lively itself, a simfull of our friends joined from SL, and a passel of folks linked up via the web to watch the streamed video.

This mixed-virtual-realities-plus-web-community stuff is beginning to feel natural. Which makes me think that -- once again -- virtual worlds are trying to teach me something through experience that I might, from a distance, have dismissed. I'm a big fan of immersion, and what you might call "verisimilitude": and I think that powerful psychological dynamics are recruited when virtual environments model reality more or less closely, or at least strive for richness, detail, and "self-containedness." So while I've been, out of necessity, a big proponent of using media and Web 2.0 contrivances (e.g., AJAX-based chat) to break down the walls between worlds, I've always viewed this as a stopgap -- thinking that, when VWs really hit massive scales and become interoperable, we won't need special tech to spread experience. What I think I'm learning, however, is that immersion tolerates mixed reality very well -- probably because, as 21st century humans, we already have huge experience with technology paradigms that have similar characteristics. Nobody thinks twice about holding a conversation with people in the room, while also watching a TV show (many TV shows -- the Olympics, presidential debates, etc., would be far less fun without such local social interaction). Mixed-virtual-realities isn't that different.

The Google Lively team, meanwhile, is going through a crash, post-launch course in the real nature of social virtual reality (in contrast to hypotheticals), and it's fascinating to hear their experiences, what they're learning, and how fast they're adapting. You sorta have to figure that folks who work for Google, and who could execute a project like this in under two years, working one day a week, are pretty much "the smartest people in the room." But being smart doesn't guarantee success when you're dealing with social variables (cranky users, preconceived market notions, demanding developer-partners, scoffing pundits, and perhaps even some corporate stakeholders who don't quite get it). What's most impressive about the Lively folks we've met is that they're listening closely, watching, debating, and that they're emotionally prepared, one gets the impression, both to toss out stuff if they decide it isn't working, and to stick by their guns if they believe it's the right thing to do. And they're winning some real victories on both sides. On the 'toss out stuff that doesn't work' side, for example, they're looking seriously at the permissions structure controlling animations, with an eye to giving avatars more control of what gets done to them by others. On the stick-by-your-guns side, Mark Young and I did a brief conversational fugue about the chat-balloons in Lively -- a UI trope I initially hated, but that I'm coming to realize actually reveals a great deal of social information in a way that linear, pure-text scrolling chat does not.

It was a fun hour. Here's the raw footage+audio in case you missed it. Have patience at the beginning, as we wade through sound-checks (ustream doesn't let you edit).

I know I date myself by making the following observation. But it occurs to me that the (cough) 'younger generation' of technology users, by and large, have absolutely no clue what it's like to switch from one word processor to another, since during the entirety of their lifetime experience with computers, Microsoft Word has been the universal standard. (Microsoft's recent switch from the classic Word UI to the new, Vista-inspired Word 2007 UI has given some young users a taste of the experience. But Word 2007 is still Word, and if you absolutely insist, you can backslide to a classic menu view.)

So let me clue y'all in: switching word processors is more painful than you would believe. Word processing is a core application with a deep feature-set and a complex UI. And experienced users get that UI in their bones. Back in the real old days, that meant memorizing reams of CTRL-key combinations, formatting tags, etc. Today, it means learning the significance and location of dozens of menu items and control-bar icons. So when you switch, your productivity hits a wall. You need to consult unfamiliar documentation or perform frustrating experiments over the simplest functions. It hurts. And the result (short-term) is blind hatred of the new system -- usually followed by Deal-Making, Despair and Acceptance in Kubler-Rossian fashion.

Imagine now how it feels to switch -- not word processors, but world processors. Over the past couple years, I've spent a great deal of time in Second Life, building, scripting, running events. And now, suddenly ... Lively. A totally different scope on the same vision. Is it therefore any wonder that my first, deep gut reaction to Lively (day before yesterday) was an amalgam of scorn, contempt, mockery and dull resentment?

This feeling was not enhanced by hanging around, last night, with an all-SL crew, in a Lively room set up by the brilliant Pathfinder Linden. On the upside, it was fun hearing people's responses -- and this was a bright, fully-clued-in crowd of SL and VW natives, with plenty of insight to share. On the downside (actually not sure it's a downside, exactly, but it left me feeling a little blue), Pathfinder was testing Lively media by veejaying a playlist of SL's best YouTube content, so we got to see/hear several repeats of the brilliant 2006 vid of Robby Dingo building Suzanne Vega's guitar, and his later vid, documenting creation of the Van Gogh 'Starry Night' sim -- two of the best and most moving pieces of SL-sourced machinema ever made. I found myself contemplating both the power of Second Life to inspire acts of radical creativity and beauty, and the richness of its creative culture, and wondering simultaneously if Lively could ever measure up, and whether its manifestation was, in a sense, sounding the trump of doom for SL's vision.

After some meditation, I no longer believe that. I think that Lively poses no direct threat to SL, and may never compete, on an essential level, with SL, OpenSim, or conceptual progeny in SL's line. Meanwhile, of course, the point is moot: Lively is void both of creative tools and deep culture -- it has all the charm of an empty presswood closet from IKEA, newly unboxed and assembled in the corner of your divorced-man apartment (to paraphrase Jonathan Coulton).

Whether valuable culture with emerge from the medium is an open question. But right now, I'm betting it will. This morning, I blew a couple early hours shell-shoping and furniture moving in Lively, and worked out most of the details for a technology harness to support multimedia events in the Lively environment and broadcast them to the web. And so far, things are working. There are lots of little bugs, but none are fundamental. The UI for moving objects around and configuring them is actually pretty good. And it's greatly liberating to work with a system that's embedded in a web page, letting me deliver a rich media/multi-application experience (e.g., Lively, plus audio stream, plus video stream, plus AJAX-driven powerpoint slides, plus multilocation chat) from within the same DOM construct. When I get authorization to proceed as a developer, we'll see how content creation and scripting work, and what the system can really do -- but so far, I'm sanguine. There's a there there.

I know it's shallow, but one of the things that's making me particularly sanguine, at the moment, is seeing Lively expanded to full-screen on a really good display. I'll bet I'm not the only person who suffered from this mental block -- but for some reason, Lively's webbiness ... the fact that Lively rooms embed in web pages in a 460 x 400 iframe, and pop out into stand-alone windows sized (logically enough) to fit comfortably on a minimal display (e.g., 800 x 600) made me (inchoately) assume the system couldn't drive big screens. Not true -- hit the fullsize control on the popped-out Lively client and it happily expands to give you a crystal-clear, fullscreen view.

Which in turn, solves another problem people were complaining about: the tendency of dialogs in Lively's "fly in from the right-hand-side" control interface to obscure most of the active screen. This is a problem when viewing chat in 'Chat History' mode, and a severe issue when trying to move stuff from inventory into a room and arrange it. But the problem is just an artifact of the way Lively's pop-out window is sized (800 x 600). Expand the window to fullscreen on a bigger display, and you're golden.

So the plan, right now, is to test out this new Lively space (see below) with "Second Life Looks at Lively" -- a multimedia whoop-de-doo of media titans on Saturday night at 8:00 PM EST (5 PM SLT). We'll have Mitch Wagner (InformationWeek), Eric Reuters (Reuters), Rhonda Lowry (Turner Broadcasting), and a few other journos and thinkers join me in Lively, wherefrom we'll broadcast into Rissa's World2Worlds sim on audio and stream audio + video to the web through my new Lively Immersive Technology Harness - Experimental (aka. LITHE). It'll be fun to get everybody's impressions after a couple days of stumbling around in the environment.

World2Worlds' Lively Office. That bear in the Aladdin suit is quite a speaker.

Rissa Maidstone, CEO World2Worlds, in Lively. Always chic.

So, everybody in metaverse dev has been waiting more than a year for the launch of Google's market-entry in the virtual worlds space.

Today, they launched Google Lively!

Lively! (I'm coining the term GL for this, right now, so we have a terse abbreviation and can stop typing "Lively!" with that obnoxious bang at the end) is based on a very light downloadable client that also works as a browser plug-in. So right there is a huge win: the 3D immersive experience can be at the level of a web page, and can be surrounded by other web stuff (e.g., voice clients, media, social AJAX, etc.). Or it can stand alone, outside the browser, like Second Life does, more or less. The client takes seconds to download and install (like five seconds ... it's really, really fast). And anyone with a Google account (e.g., gmail) can pick a room and walk right in. It's close to seamless -- though at the moment, they're still ironing out some odd kinks that can derail the URL -> download -> login -> arrive in room pipeline.

There's no 'grid' (yet). GL is about rooms pasted onto web pages. On the other hand, you can move from room to room as fast as you can move from web page to web page, and you can drive your avatar in multiple rooms at once in different windows. Which is actually pretty cool.

The UI and user experience are comparable to Doppelganger. You click and drag your avatar to walk -- click, hold and move the mouse to spin your point of view -- use various ALT, CTRL, SHIFT combos with the arrow keys to do likewise. Double-click on chairs to sit, or select from a popup command menu that shows the provenance of the object. The "first visit to competently sitting in a chair" curve is maybe 15-30 minutes for an SL native (i.e., an advanced VW user). A little better than SL, but not by much, I think.

The aesthetic? GL looks like Doppelganger -- kewl kartoon avatars, word bubbles, lavishly outsized gestural+audio emoticons (do NOT type 'lol' unless you want to look like a complete idiot). It's ... kind of America Online for now. But presumably, people who don't want to look like cartoon/anime skateboard punks or girls with huge liquid eyes like paintings on velvet will eventually be able to select from innumerable businesslike/realistic avatar types. The initial response by business, however, is likely to be lukewarm -- except for branding folks working consumer markets and the 'tween' constituency. One hopes these latter will not be suckered into repeating the mistakes some of them made in SL -- drawn by the siren-call of low-friction-of-entry and website integration into thinking that, in GoogleSpace, Virtual Worlds really _do_ work like the web. Note to brand managers: they still don't.

Meanwhile, strategically, Google's decision to wrap Lively! (GL to its friends) in tween clothing is impeccable. Business folks won't even try it during these first, kludgy weeks and months, so they won't get a bad first impression that sticks. Kids _will_ try it, and so will developers, and pretty quickly, it'll start looking more civilized.

Rissa set up a test Lively-room over on World2Worlds, so we could start experimenting. Please visit. We'll be diving deep into the dev and questions of scale over the next few weeks.

As an online publishing professional, I'm always on the lookout for sensible ways to serve ads contextually. I don't want to waste people's time. I don't want to show them stuff they don't want to buy. I want to make sure my sponsors and advertisers get good, solid clickthrough from qualified potential customers. On a technical level, of course, I'm familiar with many strategies for contextual ad-service and work with them every day. So I'm not freaked out by the concept, or with many of its functional expressions.

Still ... there have gotta be limits on how creepily-perspicacious these systems are allowed to become. And I'm sorry, but -- as of just now -- Google's gmail is overstepping.

I just posted a comment to a blog entry over on Rissa's blog at www.world2worlds.com. And because I'm subscribed to receive email when comments appear on that blog, I immediately got an email pingback about my own comment.

Without getting into the thread itself, my comment included the paragraph:

"This is worrisome when you consider some of the politico-ideological threads at play in virtual reality today, like 'transhumanism,' which may seem in certain lights (and in certain companies) benign, but connect via short links to anarcho-capitalist-elitist, radical libertarian and ultimately fascist root-thought."

So I see the ping show up in my gmail inbox, and then I see the one-line page-top ad (just above the inbox) shift to show the following:

Run, do not walk ... okay teleport (SLURL) to see Scope Cleaver's amphitheatre on SL5B Linked. It's the most beautiful piece of curvilinear prim-building I've seen in SL. No trickery here. Not a great deal of texture-work, from what I can tell. Just spot-on assembly of an intensely-moving structure, heavy use of subtle color and transparency, recapitulating the lines of a ... I dunno ... breaching whale, or some graceful polyp -- shot through with rays of light and glow, containing a massive space with a surprisingly-intimate and effective theatre at the center. Breathtaking.

Down at the bottom of that comment-train, this morning, was one from resident JetZep Zabelin, which read as follows:

Most of the modern world is designed in the "virtual" world: in drawings whether it's pen and ink or sophisticated visualization software. Business in the virtual world deserves the same respect as business in meat space. What is disappointing in SL is the economy doesnt respect me as a designer, people expect me to be paid only a couple thousand L$ for custom designs for the same type of work that I get paid anywhere from $20/hr. to $100/hr. in real life.

Ain't that the truth? So ... why is SL still like virtual China as regards compensation for skilled work? Is it simply that the supply of adequately-skilled labor far exceeds demand?

Yes, certainly. But that simple statement, though correct, hides some interesting complexity. On the demand side, corporate incursions into SL have slowed by comparison with a year ago -- the initial land-rush (profitable for many creatives) replaced by a more gradual pace of new-market entry, while surviving early entrants consolidate and seek hard ROI. This gives us, I think, something that models the second phase of a colonial economy. Still a plantation economy (i.e., we're still mostly selling 'inworld marketing' in one form or another -- the equivalent of sugarcane or bananas), but one of increased supply/demand diversity (though lower overall demand) in the wake of the passing of the first pulse of hype and the first generation of colonial profiteers.

On the supply side, meanwhile, most top talent still has a foot in <quote_fingers>real world</quote_fingers> work, or is managing to subsidize its inworld work to some degree. Which doesn't offer much in the way of pricing traction.

If this analogy is meaningful -- what changes the picture? Increase in demand, obviously. But by the colonial analogy, that's like increase in the demand for sugar or bananas -- not the basis for a healthy 'international' economy. I suspect what's required for that is growth both in absolute demand and in demand diversity -- and I think that's what I'm seeing. The projects getting press these days are all over the map: experiments in architecture, in engineering, GIS, new approaches to commerce, communicating about structure and serving communities. Definitely worth a look at the ustream video of Rissa's panel, the other day, at SL5B, on Urbanism, Architecture and Engineering -- some very talented and interesting people there: Keystone Bouchard, Tab Scott, Diva Canto, Hiro Pendragon and Boston Borst -- talking about mind-blowing projects, applying SL to help collaborators and communities visualize structure, solve problems, and achieve concensus. Rissa's post on the panel (with vid) is here.