National Geographic is Feeling Lively Today
The social and interactive web is going 3D in a big way and Millions of Us is feeling lively! We are thrilled to unveil a brand spankin’ new experience in a brand spankin’ new virtual space! The product may be new, but the names behind this experience are globally recognized. The product we are referring to is “Lively by Google” and we are honored to partner with National Geographic Channel to bring you the first of many experiences this product will offer. Today, we are launching National Geographic Channel’s LA Hard Hats into Lively by Google.
Eliana Sur as a Lively avatar - a feisty little buccaneer!
Lively enables users to visit, chat, and interact in a catalogue of 3D spaces, each space having its own unique style and experience. Users can customize their own space to add to the catalogue and share their spaces with friends. Creating a space can be as easy as picking a room shell, decorating it with objects from the Google 3D Warehouse, and naming your space. Integration with YouTube and Picasa Web allow users to stream video content and display photos right in their 3D environment. Evangelizing your freshly created Lively experience is important and this is simple as well. By adding a short piece of html code located under the room window, you can embed the space on any website, indicating this platform has great potential for viral content distribution. Lastly, and most importantly I would argue, Google’s scale and distribution places this product firmly in a category all its own.
Shrug : )
To inaugurate this new product, Millions of Us has teamed up with National Geographic Channel to create an experience in Lively based on the “LA Hard Hats” series premiering Sunday, August 3rd at 9 pm. The television series chronicles the heavy-duty work of a construction crew as they build an LA high-rise for nearly 2 years. Our interactive Lively experience captures the best features of Lively while immersing the user in the LA Hard Hats story. Download the Lively application, create an avatar, and come see what “Mud Men” and “Rodbusters” are all about by clicking here or on the embedded room at the bottom of this page! Then, grab a hard hat, some caution tape, a couple of barricades, and the LA Hard Hats room shell and create your own custom “under construction” Lively room. Or, you can just steal ours by grabbing the code.
Special thanks to Matt Zymet and Brad Dancer at National Geographic and Mel Guymon and Danny Parks at Google for all their enthusiasm and insight during the production of this project. Big thanks to Kess Quin and Bill Wrentmore at Millions of Us for development. It was an honor and a pleasure working with you guys.
For Inquiries:Mat Small, Media Director - mat(at)millionsofus(dot)com
July 15th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Congrats on this project…my Lively avatar is proudly sporting the National Geographic hardhat :]
This is a great first step by Google and helps the virtual worlds industry a LOT to have that validation of a big player. The Lively platform is fun, easy to install and use and perfect for casual social gathering and communication, especially for teen audience. And the 3D animation system is already well developed for a verion 1.0 product. I could imagine this will be used in countless fanboards and forums around the net (we’re already using it in one of our blogs)
However I really hope the content creation is opened up more widely soon - there is always the place for the premium developers such as Millions of Us who will service the Tier 1 clients who will move into this.
And for everyday users and amateur developers being able to customize the experience even more ala IMVU should be a lot of fun and help adoption. i can understand the concern with adult content, but surely nothing a good “report abuse” and moderation system wouldn’t solve?
July 18th, 2008 at 10:45 am
[...] things right? And so, from the Creative Diretorless Millions of Us, Ruben’s home, we get an immersive brand experience on Google’s [...]