Vivaty

» see vivaty.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Vivaty needed AIM to make sense, and Turkey never had AIM. The whole product assumed a messenger window you would want to hang a 3D room off, and in 2008 the messenger window here was MSN, which had nothing of the kind. I was twenty-four that year and on Facebook like everyone else, but the 3D layer bolted onto it was a US-coded idea that I never once saw anybody open.

The company was older than the name. It started as Media Machines, built around Flux, an X3D and VRML viewer that ran as a browser plugin, with Tony Parisi involved, who had co-created VRML back in the mid nineties. In May 2008 Media Machines renamed itself Vivaty and pointed the same rendering work at consumers rather than at standards committees.

The product went public in July 2008. You got a room, you decorated it, you stood in it as an avatar, and other people walked in and typed at you. The genuinely new part was that the room was embeddable: it ran inside a Facebook profile or an AOL Instant Messenger window instead of a client you had to install and then remember to open. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Mohr Davidow Ventures put nine and a half million dollars behind it.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The timing looked right on paper. Second Life had been on magazine covers for two years and Facebook applications were the growth story of 2008. Every investor deck that year carried a slide about the 3D web arriving, and Vivaty was that idea with the friction taken out of it, since there was nothing to go and download and nowhere to go beyond a page you were already sitting on.

The read turned out to be wrong in a specific way. The founders had assumed Second Life was the first of hundreds of experiences like it and that the web as a whole was heading in that direction. Keith McCurdy, the chief executive, said afterwards that Second Life was a single product rather than a preview of anything, and that sentence is close to the entire post-mortem.

~ what got buried with it ~

Vivabux arrived in November 2009, a currency for buying things inside the rooms. It never came near covering the cost of running them. Jay Weber, the co-founder and chief technology officer, said as much in plain words when the end was announced on 31 March 2010.

The company refunded currency bought after 1 February, with the exception of purchases made through the Gambit ad network, which could not be reversed. Sixteen days is short notice for a place people had spent a year furnishing, and there was no export path for a room, so everything anybody had built went off with the servers on 16 April.

~ the long tail ~

Microsoft bought what was left in October 2010, which by that stage meant the engineers rather than the product. Nothing recognizably Vivaty ever shipped afterwards.

The idea it was early for keeps coming back on roughly a six-year cycle and it keeps failing on the same point. A 3D room is more work to be in than a text box, and the payoff has to be very large to justify the difference. Vivaty had the friction problem solved better than most of what came before or since, and it still could not sell enough currency to pay for the machines. Everything after it, up to and including the metaverse push of 2021, hit the same wall from a different angle.

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