Mountain View (CA) - Google has discovered the world of avatars and launched a new 3D environment that has its origins in, you may have guessed it, one of the company’s 20% projects. You can use your Google login to create a virtual character to interact and chat with other users. Virtual rooms can be easily embedded into websites.

Lively is, just as most avatar-based environments, a chat room on steroids: Your interactions with other users are visualized and, in this case, heavily animated. When you are done creating and dressing your avatar you can join other users in countless rooms that are expected to become meeting destinations, but currently are filled with people who are exploring the ways how Lively really works.

You can move your avatar in all directions, change viewpoints from third-person views, birds-eye view and avatar view and approach and chat with other avatars. You can even prompt your character to engage in mostly funny actions: All your smiley shortcuts work and you can let your character laugh or cry and use a context menu to choose from more actions such as sleep, sit, workout and dance. You can also interact with other users via a separate menu, say hello, hug, punch or, if you really want to, propose. Yes, there are plenty of tools to make a fool out of yourself.

Probably the most interesting feature is that you can implement your Lively room on your website and get in contact with your visitors. This may be one more interesting touch to make a site much more interactive than it is today.

You can download Lively here.