GigaOM's Wagner James Au recently visited Beijing, where he spent some time with HiPiHi, the "Chinese Second Life" we heard about somewhat recently. From his detailed impressions:

For a Second Life user, the most striking thing about HiPiHi is how similar its interface is – reverse-engineered is probably the more accurate term. (This despite the fact that Second Life’s confusing user interface is easily its weakest selling point.) Xu said he conceived of the basic idea before even knowing about Second Life, but it’s abundantly clear he and his team have modeled a lot of HiPiHi on it. Like Second Life, content is streamed from the networked HiPiHi servers — which comprise the world — to users’ computers.

Residents can shape their environment with a library of prefab, customizable artifacts (furniture, homes, etc.), or for the more ambitious, in an atomistic creation system that very much resembles Second Life’s tool chest. (Albeit without a scripting system, though Xu’s team promised one will be available in October, when HiPiHi is slated to be launched) The 16,000 or so beta users/testers are drawn from the Chinese regions, but Xu said English and Japanese versions will launch later this year.

A key distinguishing feature of HiPiHi, Au says, is that subscribers retain the underlying IP rights to all of their in-world creations, which would separate it from all other MMOs thus far. According to Au, HiPiHi founder Xu Hui is working with Creative Commons China to create a CC-licensing system for user creations in time for HiPiHi’s commercial launch.

What about the most obvious questions we've had about HiPiHi -- how will it deal with China's heavy-censorship government? Au explains:

Xu said cybersex in HiPiHi will be OK, as long as it’s done in private; political talk on the other hand, will be prohibited. To do this, Xu will run user chat through a keyword-filtering system derived from China’s Great Firewall. Zhang said the beta users are already voluntarily watching what they say.

“It’s self-censorship,” he offered. “They know what kind of words will be very dangerous.” But while you can’t type, for example, “Falun Gong” in chat, you’ll probably be able to game the filter by creatively misspelling the banned meditation sect. And the filter, the HiPiHi team acknowledged, won’t be able to block non-textual acts of dissent — say, protesters wearing user-made Falun Gong T-shirts.

[Via GigaOM]