Hello All! This is Greg Mathy, a member of the DAA Second Life Team. I recently came across a product extremely similar to Second Life. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the Sony Playstation. Very recently, at GDC (The Games Development Conference), Sony announced a new feature for the PS3, known as Home.
Home takes advantage of the PS3’s breathtaking graphics, and, being a console product, will probably be more user friendly than Second Life. Every user will have his or her own “Home”, or apartment, in which he/she will have trophies received from the games played and can put up other pictures and videos that they choose to upload. The avatars will be customizable, but unfortunately will be human-only. As Mercury News puts it,
“Users will be able to upload and share videos, and watch various programs. Sony said its recently acquired Grouper division will help with user-generated videos.
The PlayStation 3's motion-sensitive controller helps navigate the world. Users can also take advantage of voice communication or type messages with an on-screen keyboard.
Users will be able to buy and download music; Sony has not indicated what other studios besides its own will offer songs.
Users will be able to communicate with others using text, audio and video.”
A drawback of Home is that it will not allow users to create their own content, something that is taken advantage of heavily in Second Life, and is part of the reason that it has been so successful.
Sony plans to launch the beta version of this for free in April, and is hoping for the official release this fall. Will this be competition for Second Life? Only time will tell.
On a side note, the team and I have been working on the domino build, and have been successful a few times. Our goal, however, is to record the working product for the video, but unfortunately, when running the recording software, Second Life begins to run quite slowly.
-G
P.S. Check out the Video Below, as well as Engadget and Joystiq.
8 comments:
Hey, it sounds like an extremely cool thing. Problem is, most of us, if not all, dont own a PS3. I love the idea though. It seems like a competetor to Second Life, only not on the PC.
Wow! The video of Home on PS3 was amazing due to its realistic graphics and features. This means that SL has some tough competition. However, since the game does not support creating and editing objects like Second Life, SL will still have an advantage when compared to Home.
Home looks amazing on Ps3 but i believe that Second Life will have more sucess because more people have pcs than ps3s.
Hey, The house looks really great I cant wait to see a Second Life version of it!!
Thanks Dre Masala!!
Looks great but i can't really say that the two are on the same level. PS3's Home is more of a social gaming system in which you can interact with and play against people from around the world but it doesn't have many options. Compare this to SL which is a whole new virtual world built by you in which you can make anything you imagine. PS3's Home is obviously a preferable for a gamer willing to buy it compared to SL which users prefer to use for more serious projects like the our own media center.
I love the idea of Ps3 it looks fun. I love your domino picture it is cool. What do you like about the ps3? Are you going to get one?
2JJ J
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