Google has taken a leaf out of Second Life's book and made its first foray into virtual worlds.

A new tool developed by the search giant will allow people to have conversations with one another in "themed rooms" online using an avatar - a persona that looks like a cartoon character.

Online chat has typically comprised a series of text exchanges in two-dimensional format, but Google is hoping there is an appetite for more realistic conversational scenarios, as people "sit down" with one another in an environment of their choice.

Once users have chosen from a selection of Disney-like avatars, they pick one of the rooms fashioned by the service - called Lively, or decorate their own. The avatars then chat with one another, with the speech appearing as little bubbles above their heads. (There's no sound - yet.)

Up to 20 people can occupy a Lively room at any one time, and users can festoon the walls with videos from YouTube and photos from the photo-sharing site Picasa - both of which are owned by Google. Once a room has been created, it can be posted to a blog, or to a user's social networking profile.

The project was headed up by Niniana Wang, an engineering manager at Google, and is part of Google Labs - an area of the Google website where the company tests new services that are still in the experimental phase.

Virtual worlds were first made popular several years ago by Second Life - a sprawling online world which now claims to have 12 million registered users, but have had something of a renaissance of late, particularly on kids-focused websites such as Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel.

Lively is not attempting to create a large-scale simulated environment - as these sites do - but Google's entry into the 3D environment will do much to validate the usefulness of virtual worlds. It will also provide support to the view held by many experts that the next big phase of the web's development is 3D.

Several major brands, including IBM, Sony, BMW and Coca-Cola have a presence in Second Life, and McKinsey, the management consultant, recently said that virtual worlds will become "an indispensible business tool" and vital to the strategy of any company wanting to reach out to the video game generation.

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