Sony Brings Visual add-on to PlayStation 3
Ron Harris - Associated Press
Sep 25, 2008
ATLANTA - Sony Corp.'s U.S. video game division is adding a slick visual program to the PlayStation 3 game system that delivers news headlines, weather reports and webcam views from around the globe.
The new touches come as an upgrade to Folding(at)home, an earlier PS3 feature that benefits Stanford University's protein research project. Users donate a bit of their PS3's processing power when they're not gaming to help researchers study the effects of protein folding on diseases.
Using the new program, "Life with PlayStation," Sony makes the effort more interactive. A PlayStation owner can now use the game controller to soar around a glowing Earth and zoom in to nearly 60 major cities for headlines and weather reports.
Google Inc. provides the headlines in the bottom corner of the screen. When a headline is selected and clicked, a browser launches and navigates to the full story.
The Weather Channel provides the temperatures for each city and the University of Wisconsin even chipped in with detailed cloud cover data to give the slowly spinning globe more realism.
Users will be happier with the webcam views - which include wide shots of urban districts in San Francisco and Berlin - if they've got a big display: It's fairly lackluster on screens 27 inches or smaller.
The new features should complement Sony's upcoming avatar-based virtual world called PlayStation Home. Currently in closed beta testing, PlayStation Home lets people meet, chat and plan gaming and non-gaming activities.
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Copyright 2008 by Associated Press
