HiPiHi Enters Open Beta

HiPiHi, the developing virtual world from China, entered open beta officially today. A Friday post on an English-language forum announced the jump, but the company's announcement that the world would move from the "Genesis" phase, which drew over 40,000 users, to the "Dawn of Society" came today. With the move comes a tweaked UI and a revamped naming system, "which has taken into account OpenID guidelines, differences in user preferences between Asian and Anglo-centric web markets, the inevitable internationalization of our user base and other user experience issues."

It sounds like, based on an interview with UgoTrade, that the goal is to mix English and Chinese names, encouraging interaction between HiPiHi's diverse audience.

Likewise, the new user interface is more graphics-heavy and text-light to dodge around language barriers and fall more inline with the fact that the world itself is a graphical instead of textual environment.  With nods towards easy-use like that and the connection to OpenID, HiPiHi seems to be positioning itself to go beyond serving as just a closed off virtual world--all a part of its global strategy announced in August.

"In collaboration with our global strategic partners such as Intel and IBM, HiPiHi will embark and drive the design of a virtual world platform architecture that is more open, highly scalable and truly inter-operable, in order to lay the groundwork for the mainstreaming of virtual worlds," explained the company in today's statement.

Comments

[HatHead Rickenbacker]

The new user interface is not "more graphics-heavy and text-light" and many of the key interface screens and field labels are still in Mandarin. Only the toolbar is icon based. Not ready for international prime time but still an interesting platform and I am building away.

[Aleister Kronos]

Totally agree with Hathead - the UI is no more "text lite" than it was 6 months ago. The English language version (50011), released a few months ago, where around 50% of the UI was available in English, has not been maintained.

Unfortunately, the PDF user guides giving English-language translations of the Mandarin are now difficult to use, since they refer to a UI that is now defunct.

While I know that this is, after all, a Chinese VW, since it is also aimed at non-Chinese, I would hope for more effort to sort out use of the UI for us foreigners.

PS: When I was there last Friday, concurrency was c.45-50.

[Ken Zhao]

I dont think hipihi will attract us foreigners in the near future. let's just see the network speed from us to cn(or east europe), i known and had test many many times, Slow is the only answer. that will effect the experience of users so much.