“Dawn of Society”:
HiPiHi Enters Public Beta Testing
April 21, 2008
BEIJING, China – April 21, 2008 – HiPiHi today announced the beginning of their public beta testing phase with the release of the “Dawn of Society” version, marking an end to almost a year of private testing under the “Genesis” version of the HiPiHi platform that had amassed more than 40,000 users. The “Dawn of Society” version will re-open user registration to allow new users to join existing “elder” users in the creation of new lands, wondrous tools and artifacts and participate in the emergence of a new virtual society!
In continuity with HiPiHi’s past efforts of improving and expanding virtual-world features such as creation, socializing, commerce among others, “Dawn of Society” will unveil a few new features such as:
• Dual-naming user naming system, to facilitate truly global online interactions
o The user naming system is the bedrock of a virtual world’s social activities and the individual user’s credibility and reputation. HiPiHi believes that a robust reputation system with its accompanying asset rights system, are the fundamentals for the development and prosperity of the virtual worlds of tomorrow. Hence, HiPiHi has bitten the bullet in revamping its previous user registration system by introducing its current new 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.
• More intuitive and “human-friendly” user interface
o Beyond its fresh platinum sheen, the new HiPiHi user interface is the culmination of multiple re-designs and a data-driven process that had revealed the soul of the virtual world resident’s habits and preferences. For example, we got rid of text in favor of icons to describe the various features. It just made sense to do so since virtual worlds are all about 3-dimensional graphics. Plus, it also solves the problems of language barriers.
Besides the ongoing feature optimization and promotion of in-world creation, the “Dawn of Society” version also heralds the start of the design of a new platform architecture for HiPiHi. 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.
As a classical Chinese proverb goes, “One day in Heaven is equal to one year on Earth.”. Similarly, HiPiHi’s year-long evolution, (from our earlier version releases such as “At the Threshold of an Era”, “Goddess Nu Wa Creating Mankind”, “Heavenly Duke Creating Objects” to the current “Dawn of Society”) has been at times, a never-ending and bittersweet journey for our 40,000-strong private-beta users. From today onwards, we look forward to the entrance of many more residents as they seek new life experiences on our virtual lands.
