A Virtual World Born in China, and It's not Second Life: 欢迎 HiPiHi!
China's new virtual world HiPiHi, is now in beta testing stage. This is definitely a development to keep an eye on. Even though they deny claims of cloning Second Life (read below), it will still be interesting to do a comparative analysis between HiPiHi and Second Life (another potential dissertation topic!). There are two points they make that I find interesting: "Residents retain intellectual property rights to their creation...[and] Residents may liscence their creations back into the real world."
(I have yet to try it out, but from the screenshots I have high hopes that I will find it easier to Sinocize my avatar in Hipihi than in Second Life. I had a hard time with making my avatar in Second Life look Chinese enough - so we'll see!) -Tricia
From Read Write Web : HiPiHi - A Virtual World Born in China: Even though SecondLife has attracted a lot of attention in China and the first millionaire from SecondLife is Chinese, this western virtual world has still not been officially launched in China. But the rapidly growing Chinese Internet apparently could not wait for it. Last week a Chinese virtual world was launched, named HiPiHi. It's a SecondLife-like 3D virtual world and it started a limited beta test last week. We had a very nice talk with HiPiHi’s founders, Hui Xu (CEO) and Xinhua Liu, to find out more about this new Chinese virtual world.
HiPiHi was founded in Beijing in October 2005 as a privately held company funded by GCIG. HiPiHi is the only Chinese virtual world and probably only the second company worldwide after SecondLife to offer a truly collaborative, immersive and open-ended experience for users to create, inhabit and govern a new world of their own design....
HiPiHi and SecondLife
HiPiHi has obtained lots of media coverage, most of which inevitably link it to Linden Labs' SecondLife - a few of them even call it a clone of SecondLife. We asked Hui for his thoughts on that:
“When we started discussing the HiPiHi back to 2005, actually we had no idea about SecondLife. SecondLife came to international attention in late 2006, then we studied it and found out we are both working towards a similar direction. It is absolutely a misunderstanding of virtual worlds if people think HiPiHi is a copycat of SecondLife. The virtual world is not just a 3D environment, but a complicated social system including the property policy, financial policy etc. HiPiHi is born in China, [so] we really hope it can embrace our own culture”.
Xinhua also added that “according to the CNNIC’s report (Jan,2007), over 70% of Chinese netizens are under 30 years old, but the average age of SecondLife is reported to be 32. Chinese users have different interests and views on the Internet market. HiPiHi and SecondLife can learn from each other, but neither of us can simply copy the culture from the other”.