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Monday, March 5, 2007 at 2:46 PM PT
First Looks at a “Chinese Second Life”
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There’s been a lot of buzz recently over this trailer for HiPiHi, which purports to be a Chinese version of Second Life. The dialog is all in Mandarin, which I don’t speak, so I’ve been holding off on commenting until I could get a translation/summary from those who do. Two Asia media/VC bloggers, Bjorn Lee and Kaiser Kuo, have taken up that gauntlet, so now we have numerous nuggets to work with, summarized after the break:
- HiPiHi (pronounced “high-pee-high”) literally translates to “The World Exists Because Of You.” (Quite similar to Second Life’s official slogan, “Your World. Your Imagination”.)
- Has been in development since 2005, only going into Beta now.
- As with Second Life, includes 3D user-creation tools, purports to allow users to retain retain property rights over their creations, and includes an in-world currency.
- Includes two discrete products: HiPiHi World, and HiPiHi Home, a private space for users in which they can invite their friends. Lee points out the similarity in this regard to South Korea’s CyWorld, the extraordinarily popular apartment-based online world/social network which boasts 18 million users.
“My gut,” Kuo comments, “tells me that done right, this could be quite substantial in China, and might have more legs than its U.S. counterpart. For one thing, MMORPG culture is pretty deeply embedded among Chinese netizens, and many players are very used to ‘repatriating’ currency earned in the in-game economy to real life.” He’s not kidding: another virtual currency has become so popular in China, government officials there are condemning it as a threat to the country’s currency.
Online world game design guru Raph Koster (who spotted Lee’s analysis) thinks it isn’t directly competing with Second Life, so much as Makena Techology’s There. “I didn’t see any mention of scripting; I also didn’t see any 3d modeling,” Raph notes. (SL has both.) “What I saw was lots of tweaking of pre-fabs: adjusting hues, scalars, and so on. Looks like it has some decent building tools for landscapes.”
To me, the main question is how a native user-created world can even exist in China. As industry expert Lisa Cosmas Hanson recently told me, while the Chinese government actively supports homegrown game development, they’re most sensitive to regulating controversial content, which very, very broadly includes “anything that is detrimental to state security, anything that instigates discrimination, anything that discusses religion, anything obscene, and anything that disrupts social order.” So what happens when the first HiPiHi user adds a Falun Gong shrine to their home, or instigates a rally against Japanese iconography, as has happened in other Chinese-based online worlds— or even more likely, opens up a red light district?
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Comments and Trackbacks
thanks for the mention. Just a slight correction, Hipihi does not literally translate to “The World Exists Because Of You.”
The Chinese derived “hipihi” from 3 words; “I”, “Hi” and “Hapi” (from the phonetically similar “Happy”. This is all explained on their “Logos” page here: http://www.hipihi.com/hipihi_logos.html
[...] Update: This article, via a syndication on the SGEntrepreneurs blog, has also been picked up by Raph Koster and Gigagamez. [...]
Thanks for the info, Bjorn!
[...] Original post by Wagner James Au [...]
When I was doing some light research for a post on this previously, it was mentioned that they (HiPiHi World) have ‘prim’ based (SL-style) creation tools. They were not apparently shown in the demonstration video.
There’s talk of them creating an economic system within HiPiHi World, but last I looked no timelines or specifics. ‘Soon’.
[...] Sony’s Home, Viacom’s as-yet-unnamed world, along with start-ups Areae, Croquet, HiPiHi, Kaneva, Multiverse, Ogoglio, Outback Online, and Whirled. (SL blogger Onder Skall just posted a [...]
[...] that includes Sony s Home, Viacom s as-yet-unnamed world, along with start-ups Areae, Croquet, HiPiHi, Kaneva, Multiverse, Ogoglio, Outback Online, and Whirled. (SL blogger Onder Skall just posted a [...]
Hipihi now has prim based modeling with prim parameters essentially the same as Second Life. The Hipihi prim editor has some features that Second Life’s prim editor doesn’t, such as being able to select multiple objects and align them with each other by x, y,z or all axes.
A document with screenshots of the Chinese interface annotated with English translations should be available very shortly, if it’s not already been made available. The new piece of information already exists but may by waiting for possible final tweaking and a decision by Hipihi on how to make it available.
While this is of course not as nice as having a true English version of the program, it should make it easy enough to test the program and the prim editing system that those who didn’t perform thorough tests of Hipihi earlier due to the language issue should give it another look with the new documention.
SL builders looking to expand their market should examine Hipihi now so they can start pressuring Hipihi and Linden Lab to makes the prim systems fully compatible and interoperable.
Both companies claim to be working toward a 3D internet. Both companies should demonstrate therir committment to this ideal by adopting a standard prim format so that objects can used in both virtual world systems, just like jpg files can be viewed in any browser.
Screenshots of the Hipihi interface, with English translations, are now available in the file area at http://groups.google.com/group/hipihi-group.
This file came from the forums at http://www.hipihi.com and was prepared by the Hipihi company.
There should be an annoucement about this forum on the Hipihi web site this Monday.
The file is available now.
[...] So Wagner James Au and GigaOM say it’s it’s “high-pee-high”. [...]
Copying seems inevitable, but lets see what it has to add.
With support to other languages besides Chinese it could have a big market.
[...] Something interesting popped up in China today - 22 Nov 2007. Remember HiPiHi (as pronounced High-P-High), the China-based company which is currently involved in the virtual worlds market. Since our last encounter with Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi sometime back, we have heard that Intel China and HiPiHi have announced today that they are entering into a partnership to set up the Intel Island in the virtual world. They will be setting up a brand experience centre in the island that seeks to enhance the interaction with the consumers (or users), and the details will be announced later. The HiPiHi CEO has remarked that, “As China’s first company to enter into the virtual worlds market, HiPiHi has already attracted Intel and P&G which are well-established multi-national companies. We believe that there are other companies of such stature who will join us in the future and take HiPiHi to the next level such that it will add value and attract more enterprises and consumers to join us.” (Translated from eNet.com.cn). Here’s an interesting perspective to think about. This strategic collaboration between HiPiHi and Intel is reminiscent of the Second Life and IBM one sometime back. (Also check out Wagner James Au’s ‘First Looks at a ‘Chinese 2nd Life‘
[...]
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