I received an invitation to download and register with Sony’s Home, a virtual environment not unlike Second Life that is currently in beta and works on the Playstation 3.

The beta is still very limited: you can define how you look and move through your apartment (everyone gets one), a central square, shopping mall, cinema and entertainment complex.

It is possible to interact with objects and other people. You can, for example, move furniture around your apartment, close-up on posters and movie previews, play pool and other simple games (with others or alone). Text chat, gestures and voice chat are also available.

The graphics is quite impressive, much more so than Second Life, and movement and interaction is seamless, not unlike a typical Playstation game.

It will be interesting to see how the environment develops. I suspect the next additions will allow people to buy things to customise their avatars and apartments (the stores in the shopping mall are for clothes and furniture). This part of its interests me because it might make for suitable sites for multi-party audio conferencing (with 3D like sound to help). While the video is not necessary, some 2D / 3D representation of voices does help with multi-party conversations. I suspect though that this is not the primary purpose that Sony imagines.

After some customisation, I guess Sony will roll out more spaces to explore and probably in combination with other companies so that they might be commercialised. For example, arcades of casual games from developer-partners.

The real question for me is the extent that Sony will open the system. In Second Life much of the value is offered by individuals and firms creating spaces with unique content. For example, there are lots of education institutions (many of them with significant ambitions for teaching and learning provision in Second Life).

Sony has never been great at this type of synergy development, so despite the great graphics and user experience (at least in terms of control and interaction), I’m not convinced that it will take off, especially given the crowded space (see kzero.co.uk). If it does, then the content and monetization will have to be tightly linked to the current Playstation user base (unless Sony can introduce a PC/Mac version, perhaps with lower quality graphics, but some of the same user experience). That, though, seems unlikely.