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November 20, 2008, 02:06 PM ET
Google to Shut Down Its Virtual World
Some colleges and professors have been enthusiastic early adopters of virtual worlds, 3-D online environments that attempt to simulate some of the visual social cues of face-to-face interaction. They’ll soon have one fewer online playground to experiment with.
Today Google announced that it will pull the plug on its virtual world, which it called Lively.
Thousands of Arizona State University students had served as the early testers of the online environment before it was publicly unveiled in July. But some scholars studying virtual worlds had been critical of Google’s strategy, especially its decision not to let average users freely create new online spaces in the world, as another popular system, Second Life, does. —Jeffrey R. Young
Categories: Research
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