The Second Life competitors materialize?
So supposedly everyone is trying to clone Second Life. Here’s word via Mobil Avenue on three different takes on the model, each trying to fix what they see as a key issue: HiPiHi in China, which looks like SL with easier tools; Planet Cazmo, which keeps the house decorating aspect but changes it into a browser-based Animal Crossing lookalike; and finally, reviews trickling out of the closed Kaneva beta, which is putting more MySpace peanut butter in your SL chocolate. Are they really SL clones?
So, HiPiHi really looks like SL. A lot; check out the avatar stances on the homepage. Some of the high-end screenshots seem to show off a bit more artistic sensibility on someone’s part — I don’t know whether those pics are from user-built or HiPiHi-built showcases, but they do look pretty good. Bjorn Lee has written a good overview that expounds on similarities and differences; perhaps the most obvious is that HiPiHi offers not one but two facings. HiPiHi World is the alleged SL clone; HiPiHi Home is more like CyWorld, very “apartment” based, but with real avatars and the ability to go visit other people. (And that seems to be where the pretty shots come from). There’s mention of convergence with mobile devices too. On the rest, it sounds similar: user ownership of IP, in-world currency, pictures of people flying around, and so on.
You can download a trailer for the title here (30MB RAR-compressed WMV). Apart from the incongruous use of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” as a backing track for the house decoration segment, what it reveals isn’t so much like SL as like There. Which, given the recent success of Virtual Laguna Beach, may actually be a smart move. I didn’t see any mention of scripting; I also didn’t see any 3d modeling. What I saw was lots of tweaking of pre-fabs: adjusting hues, scalars, and so on. Looks like it has some decent building tools for landscapes.
Quite a contrast to Planet Cazmo, which looks like Dofus or Animal Crossing, very cartoony, and not like SL at all. It’s more entertainment-focused, witht he splash page talking about playing mini-games to earn points so you can buy more stuff — very Club Penguin, but with 3d avatars, the ability to create in-game content in some fashion (the site does not elaborate), and house decoration. There’s not much on the site yet, and it looks like there’s not much in the title yet either: it’s telling that the screenshots all seem to be taken within ten feet of one another. SL clone? I don’t think so…
Kaneva is still under NDA, which is getting obeyed, bent, or broken to varying degrees. 3d apartments, check. Pre-built geometry that you can buy and then retexture. In-world streaming video. The interesting parts are, of course, the very very MySpace-like integration of a social network. You can actually look at this part right now — and yeah, it looks like MySpace. With virtual apartments. This is a phrase that during my fundraising process I must have heard hundreds of times… Although Kaneva themselves are saying “Second Life Lite,” they must mean really really lite.
So these supposed SL clones don’t look like SL clones to me. One looks like the Chinese version of There’s original tagline of “Virtual Club Med.” The next looks like a higher-production-values version of Club Penguin. And the last looks like MySpace with virtual apartments. I don’t actually see anyone cloning SL itself, despite it being on The Today show. Some of this, no doubt, is because what SL is doing is really hard from a technical point of view; and some of it is because of the perception that no matter what numbers it hits, it’s still geeky and unappealing to the mass market. Were SL more firmly in the videogame market, it would have been cloned by now for sure.
Interesting news about HiPiHi. First I’ve heard of it. Wish I knew Chinese in any flavor.
I loaded Kaneva a couple of days ago after getting an invite (which would seem to have been offered in contradiction to the whole NDA thing; which I *did* read btw). Be that as it may, I want to explore it a bit more before I form an opinion. I still like the idea of merging the 2D aspects with the 3D though. Anyway, right now I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my new Ning account/network (aside from using it to gauge my anti-social behavior).
What’s loathsome about Kaneva is that it really flogs the FIC concept: you can only come into the 3-D world if you get an invitation from another “connected one”. If you aren’t connected like csven, you are supposed to go to the site, and keep trying to acquire lists of friends, join communities and “make content”. That means uploading pictures of your zany cat in a blender or yourself all emo with eyeshadow melting, writing death poetry and stuff — it’s all Myspacey but more so.
Because the system is already avidly gamed — and not even cynically gamed but zealousyl gamed — completely strangers flock to “rave” you. You rave everybody else, becaue if you collect enough raves, maybe, just maybe, the game devs will let you in the 3-D world.
Meanwhile, as the conneted like Mark Wallace of 3pointd.com get into the world and blog it up, you languish, paging endlessly through unicorns and hearts and stories of baby back ribs in Memphis and clips of Sweet Child of Mine, hoping, hoping to collect the raves and get noticed.
After an hour of farming Kaneva, you get annoyed. For one, despite all the stuff about how it is easier and SL lite and whatnot, it actually has the usual roster of counter-intutive fussy stuff and hardships trying to do simple things. I’m just liking vox.com better for this stuff lately.
heheh Ok I’m down for trying this, but my only requirment is that I get to not only PVP in the 3D enviornment but gank their profile if I dont like it….oops there goes my beta invite 🙂
Raph, no offense k? But you seem awfully interested in SL. Do you play it or do you have plans to follow the model to some degree yourself? Don’t take that wrong carnal ,I know you have your own style of mmo ( which we all love the hell out of it seems) just curious as to how much effect sl will have on your future development plans as they concern areae.
“If you aren’t connected like csven…”
I am? How?
Mark T, I think that anyone who works in virtual worlds needs to be as aware of stuff like SL as they do of stuff like WoW. And for better or worse, there are a lot more interesting things happening surrounding SL right now than there are surrounding WoW.
Me, I don’t play either one actively, but have checked them both out, of course.
What we’re making is not an SL clone, that’s for sure.
Do any of these Second Life “competitors” feature scripting? It seems to me that the ability to script behaviors for things you create is a crucial feature for supporting interesting user-generated content. With modern 3D engines, any college freshman computer science major can knock together an avatar chat system in a couple of weeks. There’s an ocean of differences between that and a general purpose immersive online VR system (which even Second Life fails to achive in a number of ways).
Prok, that invite came entirely out of the blue. I suspect they sent me an invite because I blogged about it, as I have no “connection” to Kaneva. Had you correctly interpreted the phrase “which would seem to have been offered”, this would have been clear to you.
So I spend my weekend going over various platforms/worlds/whatever, trying to find alternatives to Second Life. While the end product writeup isn’t exactly in-depth, and my prose was a bit rushed as I slapped everything together, I felt pretty good about how complete the thing was.
Yeah. Then today I discover that I’ve never even heard of Planet Cazmo, and I really should have. *sigh*
It’s so much work – staying ‘l33t.
I’m with Raph. The VWs he mentions aren’t clones, and I would argue that they’re not even competitors unless you consider any activity which fills leisure time to be a competitor.
Do we really need another Second Life? I understand that it has its flaws, but there are so many forms which VWs can take other than One Big World on One Big Grid with One Big Client. I’d be really happy if we all just let SL and There cover that territory and instead poured our time into new ways of using VWs.