A First-Hand Look at a Chinese Second Life, HiPiHi

(* Source: Gigaom *)

Wagner James Au says :

Zhong Guan Village, Beijing – Last year, a mysterious YouTube video purported to demo a “Chinese Second Life” called HiPiHi (pronounced “high-pee-high”) stormed the virtual world blogosphere. But with little English language commentary to go on, metaverse experts like Raph Koster were left to wildly speculate.

Was it Asian vaporeware attempting to cash in on a Western fad? Or something bigger than that? And if it really was a user-created world like Second Life, how could it succeed in the land of The Great Firewall? To get those answers, I did the only sensible thing: I flew to Beijing to see it for myself.

Actually, it was a touch less dramatic than that. I’m already in China, in part, to speak about Second Life at the excellent multi-city Get It Louder arts festival. As it turned out, Xu Hui, HiPiHi’s founder and CEO, was on a follow-up panel. Afterward, he invited me to stop by the office, located in Beijing’s high-tech district (Microsoft’s campus is visible through the haze from the main office windows), for a look. We were joined by Zhang Anding, Hipihi’s young policy director. What follows are my notes from that meeting (with some details quite possibly lost or gained in the translation.)

Dare to Compare

For a Second Life user, the most striking thing about HiPiHi is how similar its interface is – reverse-engineered is probably the more accurate term. (This despite the fact that Second Life’s confusing user interface is easily its weakest selling point.) Xu said he conceived of the basic idea before even knowing about Second Life, but it’s abundantly clear he and his team have modeled a lot of HiPiHi on it. Like Second Life, content is streamed from the networked HiPiHi servers — which comprise the world — to users’ computers.

Residents can shape their environment with a library of prefab, customizable artifacts (furniture, homes, etc.), or for the more ambitious, in an atomistic creation system that very much resembles Second Life’s tool chest. (Albeit without a scripting system, though Xu’s team promised one will be available in October, when HiPiHi is slated to be launched) The 16,000 or so beta users/testers are drawn from the Chinese regions, but Xu said English and Japanese versions will launch later this year.

At the same time, some of the graphic elements in the demo I saw are already superior to Second Life, such as dynamic water reflection, and a considerably more lush and varied environment. The singular feature that distinguishes Second Life from all other MMOs so far is that subscribers retain the underlying IP rights to their creations — and here, too, HiPiHi will compete.

More here

A Walkabout thru HiPiHi