Continue reading »]]> 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.

Sony brings visual add-on to PlayStation 3 – Yahoo! News

Continue reading »]]> Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) today announced that it would release Life with PlayStation(R) for PLAYSTATION(R)3 (PS3(R)) today, September 18, 2008, worldwide simultaneously. Life with PlayStation is a new lifestyle service that offers users a new visual and interactive way to use their PS3 to access news and information from around the world, only possible on the PS3′s feature-rich platform.

As the initial content, LIVE CHANNEL will be released for Life with PlayStation. Through network connected PS3, it delivers worldwide news and information centering on two themes, “place” and “time” on a world map interface. Some of the live content includes; cloud imagery (provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center), along with weather information (provided by The Weather Channel), news headlines (provided by Google News(TM)), and live camera images (partially provided by The Earth Television Network) of nearly 60 cities around the globe. Through LIVE CHANNEL, PS3 users will be able to enjoy worldwide news and live information free of charge. In addition to LIVE CHANNEL, Life with PlayStation will continually deliver a wide variety of interactive content and channels to living rooms through network connected PS3s to further enhance the world of entertainment made possible by PS3.

PS3 users can easily join Life with PlayStation by simply clicking the Folding@home*1 icon on the network column of XMB(TM) (XrossMediaBar) that will update to Life with PlayStation.

With the latest update, Folding@home will support more advanced simulation of protein fold, and will also support PS3′s unique Folding@home ranking system, which enables users to see where they stand among the worldwide contributors based on their level of contribution. SCE will vigorously promote the expansion of the world of PS3 by introducing new services that will open up new possibilities and enjoyment in interactive entertainment.

• 1 Folding@home is a distributed computing*2 project run by Stanford University which aims to understand protein folding and misfolding, and how these are related to diseases and many forms of cancer. PS3 provides approximately 74% (as of February 2008) of the computing power in Folding@home and over 1 million PS3 users has participated in this project.
• 2 Distributed computing is an approach adopted by universities and research laboratories to utilize immense computing power without the use of central supercomputers. Small computing tasks are assigned to each user’s computer and the results are collected after computation is complete.
• For more information, please see the official website ( http://www.playstation.com/life/).

Life With PlayStation(R) Comes to PLAYSTATION(R)3 on September 18, Worldwide – MarketWatch