The Worlds in Motion Summit @ AGDC kicked off with a Q&A session with Kevin Hanna, creative director for Google's Lively, who revealed more opportunities for game makers to participate in the virtual world.

During the keynote, Hanna announced that coming soon, casual games would be able to be plugged into these 3D rooms like arcades.  Eventually, Google will open up an API to allow for user-generated content, including games.  The timeline for this has not been determined.

Lively allows users to create avatars and interactive 3D chat rooms that can be embedded into Web pages.  Although Google released Lively Beta on July 10, 2008 with absolutely no marketing, the number of users and downloads have exceeded Google's expectations.  "On the first day," said Hanna, "we thought we were under attack by spambots but it was actual users downloading it."

Lively is intended for mainstream users who want to add more personalization to web sites.  It is fully embeddable in any HTML page, with apps for MySpace and Facebook.  Now, instead of viewing a plain profile, visitors can jump into a personalized 3D chat space that can be enhanced with YouTube videos, photostreams, Google Gadgets, or customizable content from Google.  Google developers will be able to create their own content.

The UI for room creation is kept simple so that anybody, even Hanna's mother, would be able to quickly plug in any of these rooms to a Web site.  This continues Google's philosophy of "creating more tools to deepen the Web experience."  After selecting a pre-set template, users drag and drop selected furniture.  The selections vary from the mundane to the far out, like dinosaur bones.  Avatars have a multitude of options too.  For example, there are over 16,000 available hair styles.  This allows users to create more unique-looking avatars.

All of these Lively tools to create personalized 3D spaces are available for free.  While it may occur to others that the content for these 3D spaces could be sold, that's not Google's model.  "Google isn't interested in virtual dollars," said Hanna.  However, an interface will be in place for peer-to-peer transactions if content creators like game developers want to build a trading post. 

Already, users have taken to Lively to create social spaces like bars, spas, dance clubs, coffee houses and desert islands.