Notes from Virtual Worlds London: Niniane Wang's Keynote on Lessons from Lively

Niniane Wang, Google Engineering Manager and Lively Engineering Lead, opened the second day at Virtual Worlds London by discussing Google's venture into the virtual worlds space with Lively, which it launched this past July.

"The reason that we created Lively is that we noticed the Internet is becoming more social, and every day people are finding new ways to interact with each other. We wanted to give users a way to be even more social," said Wang. "We also wanted to enhance their existing experience. Instead of forcing them to have a separate life within our product, we wanted to improve their experience on the sites they already use."

Wang then showed off a user-created room based on the synchronous experience of users dancing and sharing music through a YouTube video. Another room featured just one avatar watching a video chosen by the room owner and then walking around a Spore Creatures art gallery. A third was based on the idea of a gay bar in the San Francisco Castro district, and the owner held set times for DJing and live events.

But Wang then moved on to branded experiences.

"We've had three categories of interest in addition to individual users," Wang explained. "Academic institutions are interested in using this for e-learning. Some companies are very interested in making marketing campaigns, especially when they have their own content to do a release through Lively. And some small businesses are interested who don't have the resources to set up their own small rooms or chat systems."

The response has been international. Lively was focused on the U.S. market and planned for international use down the line, but at launch, said Wang, the users from outside the US added up to as much as the users from inside. The top three countries that emerged in the first week, and still, were the U.S., Brazil, and China.

While Google was investigating how to encourage users to show off their rooms, the team found that users were already interested in organically promoting their own groups through contests and collaboration around hobbies and themes.

"The second interesting behavior that emerged was the desire to show off rooms," said Wang. "It's become important for us to be transparent in how we show off rooms in the Active Rooms list. We made a change at one point to highlight some rooms and received emails from users who were concerned about the choices. It's been important for us to be clear on how we develop that."

A third challenge was safe search. Google's general safe search protects users from adult or NSFW content.

"We anticipated that as soon as we opened the doors, some people would want to make content that you wouldn't necessarily consider corporate friendly," said Wang. "We put in tools for users to report each other. This has worked well for communities like YouTube and Picasa. One thing we learned is that it's important to make it as simple as possible. There are legal issues around making sure users explain why they're reporting something is important, but streamlining that improved rates of people reporting inappropriate rooms."

The Lively team also took steps to limit inappropriate content, but sometimes the perception of rooms was worse than the reality. For example, Triple XXX Chat simply featured male avatars talking about how bored they were. To supplement user reporting, Google automated detection systems based on combinations of words and language use. The reports are reviewed, and the system has reduced the number of rooms that are shut down.

Within those bounds, users took it upon themselves to be creative, including harmless behavior like building mosaics with basic tools to the grey area of automated bots to hacking the UI for their own purposes, which could present stability issues.

For users with less technical ability, but as much creative interest, Google emphasized integrating with existing user Internet behavior. The team wanted videos to be as easily embedded into a virtual room as in a blog and photo gadgets make it efficient to share existing photo sets, but a control systems, which have been complained about by some users, were based on optimizing for the non-virtual-world set. Users familiar with game controls are 3D movement expected to use their keypad instead of the mouse.

"Building for existing user behavior depends on who those users are," observed Wang.

As for future plans, Wang said Google is currently working on ways to clone rooms to overcome size limitations, but declined to comment on when the beta phase would end, saying that first the company wanted to receive more feedback.  For monetization, she would only say that the first step is to build a user base, and that making money would come down the line.

"Avenues we've thought of, definitely Google has a large ad inventory, but we don't have any plans to announce at this time," said Wang. The AP had previously cited Wang as saying there were no plans for allowing advertising in Lively, so that may be up in the air. "For microtransactions, we are debating whether or not that's the way we want to go, but we have no plans as of yet. Users definitely want to see branded content and we want to allow developers to create content, but we are on the fence."

For now, Lively is only available on Windows, and Wang said the team hopes to take Lively across platforms, but developing the system first takes priority.  Similarly, Wang said that integrating with Maps and Earth has been discussed, but only that it's on the radar for the team.

That might make Lively into a wider "world" as opposed to the current system of rooms, but, for Wang, that was a basic decision.

"It is very clear we have chosen not to become one complete world, but to be rooms that can be linked together. I wanted to model this after the WorldWideWeb. If you go to one page and it's discontinued, it doesn't affect the surrounding pages. And one page can be linked to 1000 pages. It does have limitations, like we lose the ability to have casual interaction with your neighbor. But if you have a neighbor, you're tied to them. By having geographical promixity you gain that, but you lose some flexibility."