China is staking its claim in the metaverse. While at the Virtual Worlds conference in San Jose today, I stumbled into a session featuring representatives of a Chinese virtual world, HiPiHi (pronounced Hippy-High).
"Most people's experience of China is from buying goods made in China," said Bjorn Lee, a Singaporean entrepreneur who is working with HiPiHi's team. "That's not the best experience to have."
Lee addressed the group in English, alternating with HiPiHi founder/CEO Hui Xu, who spoke in Chinese. The presentation included a video made in HiPiHi World, which looks a lot like Second Life (full disclosure: my husband works for Second Life creators Linden Lab).
I found the video interesting for the locales that residents (only about 2000 or so in an invitation-only beta that's been up for a couple of months) have chosen to create. While some appear to reproduce Chinese landscapes and buildings, others seem intended to offer participants an opportunity to experience places outside of China. For example, a Gothic cathedral vaguely reminiscent of Notre Dame in Paris allowed an avatar to view stained glass and a prayer book.
Also interesting was Lee's comments about the sleazy underbelly of virtual worlds, including pornography and gambling. "This creates moral dilemmas as well as legal dilemmas," he said. "The great hope is that Asian virtual worlds will be able to cure some of the ills that we see in virtual worlds today."
But HiPiHi is not just for the Chinese. Lee says the 15 percent of the beta participants are from outside China--a surprisingly high percentage given that the client software is only available in Mandarin (although you can download a PDF with English translations).
"It's intended for the whole world to use as a window to interact with Chinese civilization," he said.
Here are some images of HiPiHi World that I snagged from its Web site. The first appears to be a Chinese village:
The second shows a woman in a fetching modern dress (interestingly, the presentation showed mostly female avatars):
This last is a closeup of a woman that I chose because it shows avatar clothing.
