Sony Life with Playstation video
For a younger generation, the morning papers and breakfast TV news have long been replaced by a hasty coffee in front of the laptop while catching up on RSS feeds, streaming video and Yahoo! Weather, but Sony is aiming to take this one step further with its new Life With PlayStation information service for the PS3.
While Nintendo already has a news channel for the Wii, Sony’s Life channel is much more graphically rich with an interactive 3D globe that can be spun round to catch real-time weather information complete with images of actual cloud formation provided by University of Wisconsin in the US.
“If you’ve ever wished you could find everything you need to start your day on your PlayStation 3, Life with PlayStation will give you one more reason to do so,” said Noam Rimon, senior development manager for R&D with Sony Computer Entertainment America on the official PlayStation blog.
This double-pronged place/time news service will be pulling in information live from the web, with news from Google, meteorological updates from the Weather Channel and live webcam images from the Earth Television Network.
The service is free and can be installed through the network menu by choosing the folding@home application. Life is part of the folding@home project, which is a research undertaking by Stanford University in the US into distributed computing. This research models complex protein folding to better understand diseases like Alzheimers and Parkinsons.
“Essentially, this means that while you’re taking a stroll on Life with PlayStation, you’re automatically helping Stanford University to work towards curing diseases such as Alzheimer’s and various types of cancers,” said Rimon.
“For those familiar with folding@home, we’ve made some enhancements for more advanced simulations of protein folding and support for wider variety of simulations, in addition to adding a unique ranking system showcasing top contributors from around the world.”
By Marie Boran
Pictured: Life with PlayStation
