If you’ve never been to PlusNet Towers in real life you might like to try it in virtuality. OK, so drawing a likeness between our new Google Lively chat room and our real PlusNet Towers might be deemed pushing it a bit but hey, this is only a bit of fun right?

Google’s Lively 3d chat has somewhat caught our imaginations here at the Towers. Windows* users can download the free Lively software from the Google Labs website, select a chat room to visit (the PlusNet Community’s very own virtual PlusNet Towers of course!) and choose an avatar to use. If you’ve not registered a Google user ID you’ll be prompted to and asked to choose a Lively ID.. choose wisely at this point because you’ll be stuck with it (although you can change your avatar name whenever you like).

Lively runs in it’s own browser window or can be embedded into a webpage. Unlike Linden Labs’ Second Life, Lively seems to be very much web-centric and quicker to get started with. You’ll need a fairly meaty graphics card to get the best out of this software though. And things do tend to be a bit slow to get going at first (it’s quite processor-intensive) so stick with it while it all loads in and we’ll meet you by the pool.

P-j

* Google Lively chat only supports Windows users at the moment we’re sorry to have to report. Let’s hope it won’t be long before Google sort it out for Mac users too.

** If you want to find out more about Google Lively and what it’s all about, Times Online wrote a great article about it last week.

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This entry was posted by Peter Jackson on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 1:18 pm and is tagged with PlusNet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.