Sony brings it "Home" for the PS3
San Francisco--Sony is finally getting its own virtual reality.
As online virtual worlds like Second Life, There.com and others continue to gain in popularity, Sony on Wednesday unveiled its own version of an immersive 3D social space, known as Home and created exclusively for the PlayStation 3.
At a press briefing in advance of his keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference here Wednesday, Phil Harrison, Sony Computer Entertainment's president of worldwide studios, publicly showed off Home for the first time, explaining how it fits into the PS3 ecosystem and what Sony is calling the "Game 3.0" era.
The service appears to be aimed at giving consumers a new reason to choose the PS3--an especially important move for Sony given that recent market numbers from analyst firm The NPD Group showed the PS3 in fourth place among consoles in January, trailing Nintendo's Wii, its own PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox 360.
Part of the problem for Sony has been PS3 shortages, as well as a price tag--US$599 for a top-of-the-line PS3--deemed too steep by many consumers, particularly because of what some see as a lackluster roster of available games.
Essentially, Home is a 3D, avatar-based social environment available for free to users of the PlayStation 3 network. The idea is to give users a way to connect in a multimedia space and interact with the various forms of media available on the PS3.
Home will be a free download. It will go into a large-scale beta in April and will launch publicly this fall.
While Home has some innovative features--most notably the ability to watch high-definition quality video available through the PS3 network--it's strongly reminiscent of virtual worlds like Second Life, only deeply scaled back.
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