A Lively test room

Played around a bit with Google Lively and made a simple test room. Picked a café themed room and added some furniture and items.  There are some items (screens, TVs, frames) which one can show videos from YouTube and picture slideshows. One can add URLs to show on different items also.

Some of the items which supposedly should show stuff, like the XKCD poster, did not work at all for me.

Showing a few pictures in a frame worked fine, although it seemed to cut off at some not quite determined size and if the picture does not fit exactly it seems to only show a part of it rather than include some empty areas. When I changed some pictures, it suddendly stopped showing the pictures entirely, not sure what the error was since there was no message or indication what was wrong. Pictures uploaded through Picasa (another Google venture) can also be used to show pictures and that worked fine.

The YouTube video option is a bit annoying since it is playing continously including with sound, hopefully they will introduce some option for visitors to selectively choose videos to listen to.

There is also an option to upload your own music to play in the background for the room, although this is limited to 512Kb in size for a file, so you cannot upload your MP3 library there. I am not sure what the legal implications are if people upload parts of songs/music which is not their own creation here.

A few items are animated and thus “move” when clicked on. In general if you want to find items that you can show pictures and do other stuff with, search for “gadget” in the item catalog.

I did not put the room in the public Lively list since this is just a small test to play around with it and see how it works.