Google Lively's Kevin Hanna explained the genesis of the search engine giant's online world space, along the way revealing an upcoming API to embed playable games inside Lively.
Google Gadgets API will work on surfaces in the game, meaning that people can embed and play casual games on polygonal surfaces (such as TV screens) in the world, much like Sony's Home has been experimenting with.
The future, see a more general API for game developers to potentially create 3D multiplayer games using Google Lively's technology and back end though this is intended to be a longterm goal. (I guess it will depend of the success of Lively)
Mentioned that virtual item creators able to make money from Google Lively
The Google Lively which runs embedded in webpages requires a plug-in download for Windows.
As for the online space itself, Hanna explained that: "We wanted to add something that is a piece of the puzzle", rather than an all-encompassing online world such as Second Life.
The world has drawn some criticism for requiring a reasonably robust plugin download, but Hanna indicated that the visual fidelity and quality -- and diversity of content -- is key to Google Lively's appeal.
For example, there's 16,000 base hair styles in the game, part of Hanna's point that: "You kind of get sick of seeing the same characters over and over again."
Approved Google developers can add furniture, and 120 just got added to the system - Hanna noted it "goes to the Google core philosophy of empowering the user."
inappropriate content may be vetted by users in a similar way to YouTube, according to Hanna.
despite some negative blogosphere buzz for the application, it has actually been remarkably successful compared to initial estimates - with the unspecified target for the first month's downloads and userbase exceeded in the first 12 hours after launch.
He actually quipped that for the first 2 days, "we thought we were under attack by spam bots" - but it was actually just people downloading the game.
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