Peering Into Home

A look inside Sony's virtual community service.

When Home, Sony's avatar-based online community, is up and fully functional later this year PlayStation 3 owners will be able to chat with other players, show off their photos and videos, and get together with friends to jump into online games. For now, though, Sony is simply concentrating on getting the whole thing running smoothly.

The company said on Monday that it has kicked off a first, private beta test of Home, using its own staff and a selection from its pool of experienced beta testers to take the service through its paces.

According to one of the testers, speaking under the condition of anonymity with Kikizo this week, Home is coming along well, with some areas still needing more work than others.

Customization, one of the main features of Home, is still largely missing, with testers able to choose from only a limited range of avatar and personal space options. Eventually players will see more variety, and Sony (and third-parties) will have even more things for players to buy to decorate themselves and their personal spaces.

More developed right now is the communication system, which already supports voice and text chat. Players can use Bluetooth headsets to chat with other players around them or text chat with other players on the same network node.

Personal spaces are for now essentially just virtual rooms, as Sony has not yet opened them up to digital content such as photos or videos. Later, Sony says, players will be able to invite friends to their spaces and show them downloaded content stored on their PS3s.

One of the fears some people have for Home is that it will be overrun with advertising. Even in its current state, commercial spaces such as large billboards are being set up, though they're running Sony-branded clips for now. Ditto for the dedicated video rooms, which, after a slight wait for content to stream in, show clips from some of Sony's upcoming games.

Apart from this are the communal spaces where testers are gathering to bowl, shoot pool and play simple arcade games, including a helicopter game briefly shown during Phil Harrison's Game Developers Conference keynote address and a puzzle game featuring trains.

Sony's beta tests are important for testing not only the features of Home but also the stability of the service. Here Home is currently somewhat shaky, with the system freezing when players venture too far off the expected path. But, our source assured us, it's not something that happens often.

PlayStation 3 owners hoping to get a look at Home for themselves won't have too much longer to wait. Sony says it is planning to run a wider, public beta test of Home this summer before releasing the final version for free download during autumn.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo