Sony Announces PlayStation Home

PS3

Speaking in his keynote speech over at the Game Developers Conference, Sony head-honcho, Phil Harrison confirmed rumours of a community feature for the PlayStation 3, with the announcement of PlayStation Home.

PlayStation Home is a freely customisable, community based title that allows users to create a digital representation of themselves and let it loose in a large landscape. You'll be able to interact with other users in this space by heading online: text, voice and video chatting are all avaliable.

As well as this, your character will also have a living space, which you can decorate as you wish, using data stored on the PS3's hard-drive. Music and photos will be avaliable to use in your space. Probably one of the cooler features is the trophy system, which allows you to store acheivements from games in your space. You can display them in a "Hall of Fame" room, so you can pimp it to people who come around to visit.

While the concept seems a little similar to Nintendo's Mii feature, Sony has stressed that PlayStation Home will have far more depth. Graphically, the title looks quite pretty. Best of all, it will be completely free to download when it launches in Spring (hopefully). Closed beta testing will commence in April, so you can probably expect new things to be revealed about the service as the testing continues.