Memories From The Future

There’s not only rampaging teenagers and dirty sex in Lively, Google’s virtual world of cartoon-like chat rooms. Or would you have thought that you’d find an art gallery with the title “Captured fractions of human history” here?

This room belongs to Yaniv, a 36 year-old Jew from Israel who decorated walls and floor of his room with animated slideshows covering politics, art and history. The pictures in the backround are constantly updating themselves. We talked about religion and problems between fundamentalist Arabs and Jews and I learned that I would have been treated differently if I hadn’t told him I was married. Since you can pretend to be anything in a virtual world, carrying any name you choose, it is a good example of how important it is to take “virtuality” seriously – social conventions are in the backpack of anybody logging into virtual worlds.

Because once you feel immersed you act like you would in the “real world” – even if you’re just displayed like a cartoon-like Avatar.

If you use Windows you can have a look at the Exambitions Gallery right now (yeah I know that’s lame – Google doesn’t love Mac users):
www.lively.com/dr?rid=7746274979763050908

P.S. naturally I’ll never know if Yaniv isn’t in fact a teenager anyway(although I’m pretty sure because of our conversation)…nevertheless he created something interesting with that simple platform. Oh by the way here’s my “virtual meeting & presentation room” in Lively, just in case. Here’s a picture of it (for Mac users – blame Google, not me):

Consiliera’s virtual meeting room in Lively