Web-mammuth Google longs to capture the flag of the browser market with Chrome--something Firefox hasn't been able to manage since its release. Microsoft still holds the lion share as over 70% of the web-browsing people use the Internet Explorer. That doesn't stop Google to shoot forward, or straight upward right through the roof, though. Google now wants to open their brand-new, web-embeddable 3D virtual world Lively to 3D game developing. Can we imagine a Quake running in our browser?

Creative director Kevin Hanna, formerly an Xbox developer at Microsoft, put it this way that the Lively team's roadmap is about to open Lively's API further "to create entire 3D games entirely through Lively." According to him, developers were already allowed to join the project and create content. Tools for 3D modeling, and animation like 3ds Max, Maya, and Google's SketchUp 3D were on the way, says Hanna. The latter own is Google's very own, in-house developed, rendering tool.

But how great will the impact of Google's new ammunition be? An indirect attack at the game market with Lively? Frankly said, Lively doesn't look like much yet as its graphics are still very rudimentary. But it's fully embeddable, can be integrated in your web page for instance, and comes along with some fresh, nice feature: You can place and watch YouTube videos live (see screenshot) or photos in digital frames in your virtual house built by Lively. Considering that the capabilities of browsers is steadily on the rise, and that Google is more and more taking ground on the web market in almost any direction possible, gaming with or through Lively is just a logical consequence, another roadmap checkpoint in Google's business plan. And why not! future gaming could very well be browser-based.

You can download the Lively plugin for your browser (Firefox or IE) here (Windows XP or Vista only). However, it's quite amusing that Lively doesn't work with Google's own browser Chrome ...