HiPiHi is a new virtual world. Actually HiPiHi is two products. Forgive the machine translations from Chinese. First, HiPiHi World:
HiPiHi World is a wholly owned and created by the users of the online 3D virtual world. Residents of the virtual world of the Creator, and the creation of this world because they are constantly vigor!
Second is HiPiHi Home:
HiPiHi home is owned by a friend of exchanges and interaction between the user space in private homes. Mainly based on the Flash technology, the Internet and mobile phones, various communications tools with different content of the website (eg : blog, music and video, etc.) based on the realization of the individual centers, polymerization of inter-network, cross-platform. Personal interaction platform for rich media.
If those didn't make particular sense to you, well, let me explain...
HiPiHi Home apparently integrates with your world account. It's a MySpacey/blogger mashup with a 2d Flash chat, integratable with mobile devices, so you can stay in touch with your virtual posse in some theoreticaly totally connected way (though tier 2 Chinese cities might be rather spotty and less than that might be left out entirely at this time due to lack of coverage).
HiPiHi World is more interesting. Here's a 15MB minute promotional video of the world. Voice overs and interfaces are in Chinese, but that's not what you are interested in. Obviously someone's been putting in some serious time on User Interfaces. And in Second Life (note the area that is so very much like the old Second Life Orientation Islands).
Pros:
- The vehicle user interface obviously rocks.
- It can rescale linked objects, and replication and abuttment seem to be relatively trivial.
- The terrain meshes appear to support multi-texturing.
- Vastly improved walking animations, assuming you want to walk like a girl that on slightly too-high heels (which is what our protagonist presenter is).
- Very smooth UI throughout, even if some parts of it smell just like Second Life.
- HiPiHi, was founded in October 2005. Not very long ago, but then Linden Lab made an enormous amount of progress towards a running beta in a very short time.
- I don't recall seeing a male figure anywhere. Maybe that says something about the target market. Or the developers. I'm not sure.
- Chinese forums suggest that the whole thing is all hat and no saddle. Show and no substance. That the whole thing is being pitched for a sale to some well-heeled company that's going to get ultimately nothing usable or scalable. That could happen, I suppose. It would not be the first time in the industry. They also think it's a clone of Second Life. Well -- it looks just like one to me. Watch the video and judge for yourself.
- It's in Chinese. Politically-speaking it might be considered to be beneficial for China to have their own Second Life style world from which the rest of the world is excluded.
What do you think? Is this going to be a walled-off China-only production? A real competitor to Second Life? Or is this just a sham for a quick sale? Or something else?
1. the site about secondlife is called Chinese 3D Virtual Ccommunity Website(中国3D虚拟社区网)。
its Web address is www.slbazar.com WELCOME TO CHECK IT OUT.
Posted at 5:29AM on Feb 5th 2007 by felix