After a very good board meeting with Maxthon, I paid a visit to HiPiHi - Chinas answer to Second Life. This came about after I had written a short post on them earlier and got an invitation to swing by their office. Kaiser Kuo (Ogilvy) and Xinhua Liu (early investor in HipiHi & Technology Director at Burson-Marsteller).. also joined me.
Armed with camcorders, cameras and curious minds, we invaded HiPiHi physically and virtually. I must say that I was really impressed. I always felt like Second Life was too geeky and to inaccessible, and therefore had only signed in a couple of times and flied around out of boredom.
Not so at HiPiHi. They have been smart enough to realize that most of us deadly are not geeks and need a more user-friendly user-interface to motivate us enough to play around in this virtual world. Although they are just in private alpha, they have come along way with a team of just 60. The user is offered a bunch of pre-fabricated avatars, buildings, hills, rocks, objects and event water to furnish their own worlds. Should they feel for it later, the user can always customize or create any object from scratch as they see fit.
It is clear that HiPiHi has given much thought into making the virtual world more user-friendly. HiPiHi's CEO Hui Xu (beside me on the picture above) explained to us that the service will be launched in four stages based on traditional Chinese creational mythology (read Kaisers summary for an expansion on this).
Revenues will come from virtual property sales and advertising. And I can definitely see how advertisers will love this. Especially since HiPiHi is targeting the young and cool rather than a bunch of geeks in pajamas or "social media stars".
I shot a couple of short clips of a walk-through in HipiHi-land with a simple digital camera. Comments are both in Chinese & English. More clips here.
I have a very good feeling about HiPiHi and am waiting eagerly for the public launch.
(Image above: Sunset in HiPiHi-land).
Thanks a lot for sharing this video, it helps to show it in motion because I found it hard to navigate their official site (wish I could read Chinese!). Might you have higher-quality screenshots of these environments? The avatar design and world map looked interesting.
Posted by: Torley | March 12, 2007 at 06:45 PM
Hey Torley, my pleasure. Unfortunately I used a simple digital camera since I had run out of tapes - so sorry about the quality. I dont have any better screenshots right now but might have soon. Keep checking in from time to time;)
Great to see so many visitors from Linden Lab here :)
Posted by: Netanel Jacobsson | March 13, 2007 at 03:29 PM
Thanx for lettin' me know, Netanel! No worries, I look forward to future updates! You are like our eyes and ears. =D
Posted by: Torley | March 14, 2007 at 03:03 AM
you can find more screenshots @ bbs.hipihi.org. welcome to the hipihi paradise!
Posted by: rockxie | April 17, 2007 at 07:22 AM
Hello,
I'm in a personal organization of Hipihi, which are made of about 20 persons loving and developing in Hipihi. We welcome firends abroad to join us and enjoy in the world, no matter you are individual or company. You could contact us by Hi.pi.hi@163.com or MSN group: hipihi@msn.com. Thanks for your attention.
Jolly
Posted by: Jolly | May 16, 2007 at 08:25 AM
I'm not sure I appreciate the comment about young and cool people in pajamas.
Have you tried Hipihi yet? It's available to try, unless they've filled up all there slots for the beta testing.
For those interested in virtual worlds, it's well worth trying out.
Posted by: SuezanneC Baskerville (SuezanneCB) | July 04, 2007 at 08:42 PM
HiPiHi has gone to beta status in August: http://www.rceworlds.com/modules/article/view.article.php?a12
Posted by: Eric | August 17, 2007 at 12:34 AM