As expected, Sony revealed the full details about its new virtual environment for Playstation3—Home—Wednesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. While Sony has fielded complaints about $600 PS3 consoles, the download for Home is free. In April, Home will go into beta with full launch planned for fall. As for Home itself, it allows PS3 users to interact, communicate, join online games, shop, share private content and even build and show off their own personal spaces to others in real time. Each user gets an apartment in Home where they can invite others and can customize with furniture, art and other items – users even get to choose the view from their windows. They can also show the personal video, pictures and other digital media content found on their PS3 hard drives.
While Home is fairly expansive in terms of the control users can have, it’s still a bit more limited than Second Life or There.com. For example, Phil Harrison, Sony Computer Entertainment’s president of worldwide studios, told CNET that Sony will monitor what happens in Home’s public spaces, although he said that the private domains will remain unsupervised. Harrison also wanted to stress that Home, a project two years in the works, is not a Second Life imitation.
Aside from privacy issues, while virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com have allowed, even encouraged, users to start their own businesses— an aspect that adds to revenues—Sony appears to be a bit more ambivalent in this environment about how far to promote turning virtual profits into real ones. Some examples of businesses that could sprout up in Home were things like interior design or even catering to others, Harrison said, indicating that he didn’t see major businesses emanating from the site. For now, the main purpose of Home is to attract more PS3 users. Release
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