Vivaty and Possibilities

A few weeks ago I received an email asking me if I would be interested in trying out a new tool/technology called Vivaty.  I did a quick twitter poll asking if anyone knew anything about Vivaty to which NO ONE responded (Seriously people.. what the heck). So that told me that either no one knew anything about Vivaty, or no one felt like telling me about it so I figured I was on my own and I’d give it a whirl just to see what it was about.

This past week I was able to take part in a conference call and demonstration with Keith McCurdy, the President and CEO of Vivaty, and I gotta say.. I think this has potential. Keith introduced himself by saying that he worked previously for Electronic Arts and had developed Vivaty as a platform and wanted to get my impressions.  We used WebEx so Keith was able to walk me through some “scenes” and show me what you’re able to do while we discussed it.

In a nutshell, from my point of view, Vivaty allows you to log into a ’scene’ which is your own personal virtual environment. You have an avatar that you create with very simple choices.. not great amounts of avatar customization right up front but in my opinion.. that’s a good thing. Sometimes that stuff can be a little (a lot?) overwhelming at first. So anyway.. you log into your ’scene’ and you’re able to invite others to come join you. The scene that Keith showed me was sort of a patio area with a pool and some outdoor furniture but apparently there are/will be many others to choose from as well.  As we were hanging out at Keith’s pool he showed me how users can move objects/furniture around to customize their area and make it more unique.  It felt to me very much like a Second Life environment, but with one difference.. it’s web-based. No intensive graphic requirements, no huge processor, no leaving people out because they don’t have a powerful graphics card capable of running it.. very nice.

Another fantastic thing Vivaty can do is take YouTube URLs and allow them to be embedded in the scene and viewed by anyone that’s present in that area. There were also photos on the wall that were brought in from a Flickr RSS feed.  Vivaty is almost like a big mash-up of web content in a fantastically neat virtual package.

Vivaty is currently in beta and being used in Facebook. I’ve been invited and if any of my readers are interested, I do have some other beta invites that I can toss your way and get you included.. PC only at this point, it seems. I was a little disappointed with that because I do prefer my mac, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

Vivaty Pros:
Web-based
Immersive
Customizable
Can pull web-content from other sites into environment (YouTube, Flickr, etc)
No risk of ugly, inappropriate ’scenes’ to interfere with your space
Seems to be very user-friendly and easy to understand/navigate
More control over your environment/space

Vivaty Cons:
Still in beta
Other than the discussion with me, there was no real consideration about educational uses, but in all fairness, they did say that these were things they hadn’t thought about, but would now consider.

From my perspective, Vivaty has a lot going for it. If you can restrict your logins to a specific group (or class) you can easily have a defined, secure, virtual environment that’s community-based where groups of people can meet, discuss and view web-content together. If we were able to use a tool like this within ANGEL, for instance, allowing each online class to have their own virtual room where the entire class could meet I can see a lot of potential there for some really wonderful interactions.

I’m pleased to have been asked to provide some input and check things out and I’m looking forward to playing around with Vivaty.  I’m hopeful that they’ll keep educational institutions in mind as they progress forward and I can’t wait to see what opportunities this will present.  A big thank you to Raksha, Keith and Heidi.