China’s answer to Second Life, HiPiHi, announced at the State of Play V conference in Singapore Monday its intentions to work towards standardized 3D worlds, with an aim of eventually delivering interoperability between various platforms.
HiPiHi said it would cooperate with “global leaders in the Internet and communication industry to establish a set of relevant hardware and software standards for the development of the 3D platform.” The company would then work with other 3D virtual world providers to finalize these standards with the goal of allowing users to interact and transact between different virtual worlds.
HiPiHi current platform is remarkably similar to Second Life in both looks and features, with users creating the world and being able to own land and objects.
Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life has recently taken some steps towards opening its platform, including open sourcing the code for the Second Life client, however the Second Life world has remained closed to 3rd party servers. Linden Lab has previously said that they have “a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups” (indeed, they called it inevitable) so it will be interesting to see whether they join HiPiHi’s initiative.
(via Metaversed)
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Open sourced 3D worlds I can understand, but I’m not sure how this interoperability of 3D worlds would work…Perhaps for open ended environments like Second Life, but how would this work in applications where there is a measured purpose?
Open source, interoperability and platform issues will be discussed at the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose on Oct. 10-11, 2007. HiPiHi and all the other major VW platform operators will be in attendence. http://www.virtualworlds2007.com
A standard doesn’t happen because a bunch of “industry leaders” (who are they?) decide on one. A standard happens because a bunch of people agree to use something, and that something is sufficiently well defined and has at least one reference implementation and at least one other interoperating implementation.
A few such standards actually already exist for 3D geometry and animation formats, and also for network protocols. My guess is that they will be completely overlooked, since these “industry leaders” (whoever they will end up being) don’t own them in any way.
I’m curious if this will actually go anywhere, and we’ll hear any actual specifics in the future.
Isn’t this attempt to define a standard for interoperability the first step at becoming the central hub for all virtual worlds and in effect attempting to take control of the market - ie; any virtual world that wants to be worth anything will need to conform to a HiPiHi’s standard and connect into this centralised hub, owned by HiPiHi(if they’re trying to persue this)
Somehow i think if LindenLab are going to connect to any standardised universe’s server in order to promote interoperability, they will be ensuring that LindenLab are running the show and defining the standards ……… do you really think they’re about to hand over their market lead to some new comer ?
Good news, but i am still wondering if they can do anything for 3d worlds standard. Did u ever actually login inside the HiPiHi World? hope they work hard instead of Crap Ads.
I was at SOP IV. A few things
1. HiPiHi is working with several party, including IBM and Linden Lab as the CEO of HiPiHi claims, on the standardization of 3D environment.
2. Linden also announced their plans to eventually to make their server available. No timeline is available however.
A side note, HiPiHi announce was more about their new investor (from the Japanese NGI group). NGI group owns Mixi, the largest social network in Japan. NGI confirmed they will bring 3D environment to Mixi. The other announcement is about their international strategy, and they confirmed the initial launch would include an multilingual HiPiHi client for Chinese, English and Japanese (at least).
Copying seems inevitable, but lets see what HiPiHi has to add.
With support to other languages besides Chinese it could have a big market.