Chinese virtual world HiPiHi has announced a 3-way partnership with Hollywood-based Centric, an interactive agency focusing on social media and virtual worlds, and Japan-based virtual world service provider 3Di, to focus on creative arts inside HiPiHi.

Centric also maintains offices in Shanghai and Tokyo. As for 3Di, its recent projects include open-source community platform Jin-sei and Movable Life, a system that allows users access to Second Life using a web browser.

The company says the partnership is geared to take advantage of the virtual world medium's potential for art, media and video production. Centric says it will leverage its experience in Hollywood to bring internationally renowned projects into HiPiHi and promote it as an international platform for creative expression, while 3Di's content and service development base will support the projects.

HiPiHi founder and CEO Xu Hui said, "Virtual worlds open up new possibilities to redefine the mode of artistic/cultural production and creative expression, transcending the distance between art works and spectators, constructing a brand new interactive instrument of artistic creation and expression. Centric and 3Di will bring artistic creativity and cutting-edge media production technologies from Western culture into the HiPiHi world."

He continued, "This mix of Western-Oriental artistic and cultural fusion and exchange, in a virtual world medium that cuts through space-time constraints, is about to begin and give rise to amazing and wondrous opportunities. The eventual benefit in all these activities will far exceed any economical value affixed to it and will be a significant innovation in terms of fusing art and information technology."

[Patrick Murphy contributed to this report.]