Chinese virtual world HiPiHi recently 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 has said it plans to leverage its Hollywood position to bring new projects into HiPiHi and promote it as an international platform for creative media.

Worlds in Motion spoke to Jason Stoddard, Centric's managing partner of strategy, about the company, the partnership and his perspective on the industry.

First off, could you give us a capsule history of how Centric came to be what it is today?

The short answer is that we're an agency working in "social spaces and virtual places," that has grown from a conventional branding and marketing background. The slightly longer answer is that I founded Centric in 1994 as a marketing agency, but my background in technology quickly pushed us into the early internet revolution.

We were developing sites in 1995 and rode the Web 1.0 wave, adding leading-edge services along the way, such as some of the first integrated internet marketing programs. Today, we're continuing the push into new realms of marketing--specifically social spaces such as Facebook and Mixi, and virtual places such as Second Life and HiPiHi--because we believe that the emotional connections created here are much more powerful than the online tools of the Web 1.0 days, and will catalyze change that is larger than the entire internet revolution to date.

"Agency of Change" is quite an interesting slogan; how do you apply that attitude to your work in social virtual worlds?

We took the tagline of "Agency of Change" in early 2006 to reflect the accelerating change we were seeing in social spaces, virtual worlds, and mobile development. For us, it serves as a reminder that the only constant is change. No matter how much our clients want to put on the brakes and stay with what is tried and true and comfortable, we need to move forward into new realms. It keeps us on our toes. And, in every space we work in, we start by asking, "How can we change this?"

This is one reason we have not built one standard corporate monument in virtual worlds, or deployed one standard fake-friending program in the social spaces. People forget how much change we've been through in the last 10 years--Google didn't exist in 1997. eBay was still selling Pez dispensers. Cellphones were big dumb objects. Most people didn't have a personal email. Only 60 million people worldwide were on the web. Hell, people forget the largest Web development agency of the day. USWeb, once with a multibillion-dollar market cap, disappeared completely and without a trace.

Centric holds offices in Hollywood, Shanghai, and Tokyo; could you talk a bit about marketing on today's multi-cultural internet?

Certainly, not all things work across all regions, and that is being reflected in much more localized content in international marketing. Social spaces and virtual places are even more than multi-cultural; we believe they represent a different culture entirely. These are areas where most people congregate on an entirely voluntary basis. There are many places in the real world where you have to be in close proximity to people you wouldn't normally choose to meet, to interact with.

On the web, you can avoid interaction. In a virtual world, you're there to interact. You don't have to eat, don't have to drink, don't choose a car for transportation. Everything is instead about image and interaction. This is a fascinating switch, whereby people around the globe choose the locations, ambiance, and objects they want to be surrounded with when interacting with others. The opportunities for a true mixing of cultures is huge.

So tell us about what Centric is doing with HiPiHi.

HiPiHi is very interested in being a portal between China and the rest of the world. We are working closely with both HiPiHi and 3Di to develop strategies for extending HiPiHi's reach globally, while at the same time working with companies to develop experiences in the HiPiHi space. We have a focus on entertainment due to our main office's location in Hollywood, but it's more than that. We believe that entertainment properties offer the most viable cross-cultural opportunities for virtual worlds.

Ultimately, everything we do in any virtual world is about storytelling, about people, and China has a rich cultural and storytelling background. It's a perfect space to bring in Western stories and film properties, for example, and allow the community to bring in their experiences with Chinese stories and film to create something entirely different. This collaborative environment will also work both ways, and we feel it will allow for some experimentation with the storytelling process.

How did the partnership come about?

We went to Beijing in April of this year specifically to meet with HiPiHi. Though we didn't know a lot about them at the time, we were excited about the possibilities presented by a virtual world in China, and we were eager to get involved early in this opportunity. As HiPiHi's first Western partner, we explored possible ways to bring clients and users into this new virtual world. Now that the platform is moving toward public beta, we agreed to extend our partnership, along with 3Di, in order to fully realize the collective goals of all three companies.

Has the Shanghai office had the opportunity to do creative marketing work in Chinese social virtual worlds yet? If so, could you give an example?

We're currently exploring opportunities to bring projects into Chinese social virtual worlds, but don't have anything we can talk about at this point.

How do you see the state of social virtual worlds in China today, especially in contrast to America?

Social virtual worlds in China are really several different beasts. There's huge participation in MMOs, of course. Graphical chat clients are definitely on the rise. In addition to free-form virtual worlds like HiPiHi and Second Life, upcoming social virtual worlds like novoKing and uWorld will attract more people into virtual environments.

That said, most of the social virtual worlds are yet to be fully developed. To an extent, the massive QQ 2D social network is a social virtual world. Profiles, groups, and chat are its primary functions, but the network has its own virtual currency, its own avatars, and shows signs of moving toward the virtual world medium. The mobile component here is huge. In contrast, the U.S. is barely scratching the surface of mobile-based social-networking, let alone mobile's use in virtual worlds.

What sort of creative process does Centric go through when working with a client?

We drink lots of tequila and talk crap about their competition. Well, maybe not.

Seriously, great creative is about understanding the clients' goals, their position relative to the competition, the opportunities they have open to them, and the available budget. We start with that, then we do the research on the relevant platforms that they might play in, whether it's a social space or virtual place. Then, based on that understanding, we develop overall creative ideas, themes, and tactics that can be used to achieve their goals.

For example, a limited-budget campaign we're doing for an entertainment company, with the goal of engaging as many fans as possible, has resulted in a Facebook-only game application. A large-budget campaign for a Fortune 10 company, with the goal of creating an extensible platform in multiple social spaces and virtual places, has resulted in a proposal that covers multiple virtual worlds and social networks, and encompasses application development, gaming, virtual presences, smart objects, and artificial intelligence.

Which platforms are you currently working on, and are there specific advantages to one over the other, depending on the situation?

We focus on categories, rather than platforms. We're working in three categories: First, virtual worlds. Specifically, free-form and user-created virtual worlds such as Second Life and HiPiHi. The reason we concentrate on free-form virtual worlds is that they tend to aggregate the creative and technical users who are early adopters, rather than just a general audience. We want to touch the influencers of the future.

Second, social spaces. Specifically, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Mixi. We cut across a broad range of these, because the right venue depends largely on the type of campaign. Facebook is great for one demo, MySpace is great for another.

Third, mobile. We're starting to deploy a lot of web applications and mobile components, especially since the addressable market is 3X that of the PC space in China, and American teens think phones are more indispensible than computers. And yeah, we also do a lot of "conventional interactive" development--a descriptor that raises a lot of eyebrows among people who are still trying to digest the interactive space.

Are there any trends or technologies on the horizon for social virtual worlds that you hope to see more of in the future?

Wow. There are so many things that are not more than a factory in China away from commercialization. But let's start with the basics: UI and controller. Get Apple (or Nintendo) on these worlds, ASAP. The UI needs a lot of work (yes, even the OnRez browser). And we need a dedicated controller. It's amazing that so many people have been able to suspend their disbelief using a keyboard and watching these worlds on a small screen. But beyond that: markerless facial expression capture, and markerless gestural capture.

These technologies are here, right now, and they're very close to being commercialized. Real-world heads-up displays, either immersive or overlay, will absolutely change the game in terms of computing and virtuality both--they'll make virtual worlds mainstream. And we're very close to that technology as well. True immersion, whether it's in the form of a bodysuit and playroom, or a brain-machine interface, is much farther off--but how far, once we've accepted augmented reality displays in daily life?