GDC 2007: PlayStation 3 ‘Home’

Home’s trailer says it all. As a virtual space for match-making and socializing, ‘Home’ seems to be the biggest improvement in matchmaking services we’ve seen on consoles.

The potential is evident in the emergent virtual socializing possibilities that ‘Home’ can offer. Imagine, you can start your PS3 and access a living breathing virtual space from a new icon named ‘Home’ on the Xross Media Bar (XMB). From your very own and private virtual apartment you can set off into the public spaces of this world and find friends to socialize with or invite them to a game. Communication is possible using predictive and predefined text messages, full keyboard chat using a USB keyboard, or a bluetooth headset allowing full voice communication. You can venture out into this world looking the way you want to look as there is something for everyone. The customization options seem vast and there’s always possibilities for more to come down the road.

The fun doesn’t stop there because there’s tons of things to do besides just looking at 3D avatars and chatting. There’s virtual arcades where you can play public games with other people. You can even play mini-games such as golf or bowling, using the excellent motion-sensitivity of the SIXAXIS controller. If that weren’t awesome enough, you can invite people over to your virtual apartment and play mini-games there or full-retail blu-ray disc games if you all have the same games. This is a great way to get all of your friends together in the future to play Gran Turismo 5, Killzone 2, SOCOM IV, or any other major online game to be released on the PlayStation 3.

Unlike Xbox Live, ‘Home’ is available free of charge and offers similar functionality and in may cases more. There are microtransactions, but they’re a lot more meaningful and entertaining than what is avialable on Xbox Live. You can buy furniture for your apartment, thus making it more appealing for your guests, especially if you host a lot of online game parties. There’s tables, chairs, frames, and all kinds of things you can add to suit your personal tastes. There’s also electronics that become useful when using yet more features of ‘Home’. For example, you can have a large virtual HDTV that you can use to show your guests videos that you have stored on your PlayStation 3’s hard drive. This means if you have a movie on your hard drive you can watch it together with your friends in your virtual apartment. You can also have your friends listen to all of your music you have on your hard drive with the appropriate device in your virtual apartment. If you have pictures from a digital camera stored on your hard drive you can put them up as posters in your room, further customizing the look and feel of your very own virtual apartment. Not only that, your apartment can be fitted with trophies and awards you get from completing tasks in games and other challenges. You can basically show off by winning and accumulating more stuff than all your friends. There’s also public exhibition of awards too, in a very cool Star Wars-style hall of fame showing everyone’s achievements — so to speak.

As the virtual space grows in the future, many commercialized venues will be opened up for public access. ‘Home’ is free, so advertising is a given, but nonetheless there will be some of the coolest ads you’ve ever seen. Coke could set up a campaign on ‘Home’ allowing you and other friends to try coke related games that promote a new product. There’s also the possibility of media premieres allowing the public to experience new media such as movies or music first with other people on the network. This goes beyond telling your friends to go to Youtube and listen to X new song or watch Y movie. With this set up you can go to a virtual cinema with your friends and watch the movie or listen to the “concert” together, while continuing to be connected and communicated the entire time with everyone. We’ll get to watch and listen to all kinds of stuff submitted by other gamers on the network — just like Youtube. So while you can visit Youtube from the PlayStation 3 browser when you’re bored, you can step it up a notch and go down to the virtual cinema on ‘Home’ with your friends and have a blast.

Although none of this is set up yet, it is already running on a closed-beta at Sony. Another semi-public beta is scheduled to be worked on the rest of spring to work out the kinks in a much broader scale than it is running now as of the first build. A full release of ‘Home’ is expected by the Fall of this year some time before the year ends. It will be a free download of around 500MB according to Sony representatives.

There’s no doubt that the combination of amazing flagship titles from talented first-party Sony developers and third-party powerhouse titles coming out this year already made the PlayStation 3 a very compelling machine to own. However, with ‘Home’, the PlayStation 3 is even more relevant now as this service provides a level of immersion that no other console can provide.

For more information visit 1UP’s GDC blog

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