Google Is Out of the Virtual Reality Into… Reality

Even Google makes mistakes from time to time and its own virtual reality Lively seems to be one of such mistakes. Today Google’s team working on Lively has admitted the mistake and announced the decision to shut Lively down explaining that the company needs to focus on its core lines of business - search, ads, and applications.

Lively definitely was a short-time experiment for Google: the internet giant launched its own tool for users to create 3D virtual worlds (”rooms”) only in July so it will last only half a year by the time the experiment is finished in the end of December. Until the end of December everyone is invited to backup the rooms they created on Lively by taking videos and screenshots not to lose the results of their work.

As for the team working on Lively, engineers will simply be sent to other teams within the company so it won’t mean layoffs for them - which is obviously a good sign. But still it is a little disturbing watching even Google trying to make their expenses reasonable - cutting costs where they are not needed and can’t be viewed as potentially good investments.

And unfortunately for Lively it did not even take off in terms of traffic - so Google did not even attempt to monetize it in any way. But at the same time I would not view this decision as negative for the entire industry of virtual worlds - after all, Second Life economy is doing pretty well and will probably do even better as people escape to virtual worlds from problems in the real one. It just depends on the business model in every particular case - in Lively case it just did not exist.