• http://www.lively.com/html/landing.html

Two releases on the same day for competing products in the virtual space arena has brought the topic to the forefront again.  Both Lively and Vivaty allow the user to insert a 3D room into a webpage.  Both are much simpler than SecondLife with limited creation capabilities.  Mostly users decorate their rooms, import media from the web, and text chat with other visitors.  Vivaty is tied to either AIM or Facebook with each account tied to your own "scene".  For now at least, you need one of the two accounts and it can't be used as a stand alone on a separate site.  I particularly enjoyed the the tool tips and their helpful suggestions on how I could be cool, fresh, and invite my peeps.

For academic use, Lively seems to be the better bet.  The account is your Google account.  Any user can create a room and embed the room into any web page.  Student organizations, chats with students abroad, and language exchanges can all have rooms that are embedded into related web pages.  I've spent some time wandering between the rooms that specified a language.  So far, everyone I've met has been agreeable to the idea of having our students enter and putting their beginning to intermediate language skills to use.