Hipihi: China’s Second Life

In later last year, I know there are some Chinese companies who are working on virtual world products, as a China’s Second Life. Hipihi, among them, is the only one which I think they do work on it.

Since last week, Hipihi has drew attentions of many bloggers. My friend Kaiser and Net also visited their office yesterday, it seemed they are very impressed by its technology and ideas. Today I also phoned Liu Xinhua, an early investor of Hipihi, to learn more information on Hipihi.

At first, Liu Xinhua thought Zheng Xiaoyun should correct his view on Hipihi. They do pay much efforts into building the virtual society and an open world, they develop Hipihi not because Second Life is a hot topic now. In fact, Hipihi has been under development for about 18 months since it established in 2005. At the very first of establishment, they has planned to develop a virtual world, of course, Second Life sparked some new ideas to them. The popularity of Second Life also make it easier for them to promote it.

Xinhua thinks most of Chinese users are using internet or play games for entertainment or networking, therefore, they need to develop Hipihi to satisfy such needs. Hipihi will make it much simpler for users to create objects by using pre-fab stuffs than what they can do in Second Life. User will have much better experience in building something they are interested in. For experience users, there are also advanced setting for them to build customized objects for trading.

Xinhua also though Hipihi will reflect the real life networks of users in this open virtual world, you can almost do anything you would like to do in your real life. They also plan to invite experts in economics, finance and other fields to design the rule of Hipihi, they hope the appropriate rule will make it more attractive and funny for users to play in this virtual world, and make it more suitable to customs and culture of Chinese users.

At first, they planned to develop two different products, i.e. Hipihi World and Hipihi Home. Hipihi Home is something like a 3D Cyworld hompy. But now they will focus on developing Hipihi World. Hipihi World is now in alpha testing, it is expected to hold a private beta for up to 1,000 users in late March. Public beta for about 100,000 users is expected to be hold in June/July before the official release in about September.

Well, I’m far from an expert of Second Life or virtual world, but I think Hipihi is quite noticeable, I cannot wait to test this virtual world.

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