Sony is banking its PlayStation future on the Virtual World concept popularized by Second Life, a virtual world with 4.5 million virtual residents.
With a planned launch date of October, Sony is making HOME available to a select group of 15,000 PS3 users from April to August, then to 50,000 Beta users from August to October.
The immersive social space allows users to create avatars (multiple accounts allowed), live in their free apartment homes, and interact with one another. Each avatar your avatar encounters in this virtual universe is an actual PS3 user signed onto the network. Your avatar can invite other avatars “home” to, say, play a PS3 game [but we suspect MORE will be available through plugins and extensions].
HOME is currently non-persistent, i.e. other avatars cannot visit your apartment if you are not home (i.e. signed on), but Sony expects to introduce a persistent HOME in the long term.
HOME is free to PS3 owners.
We predict HOME will be a smashing success — provided the user interface and avatars interactions are done just right.
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