Interviews// Sony's Phil Harrison - Beyond Home

SPOnG: So if people offend you, you’ll be able to blacklist them?

Phil Harrison: your friends list is here just the same way as it is on the PlayStation network, it appears inside the virtual PSP and you can make all the same changes to it.

SPOnG: Is there an area where you can just get a list of all the things you want to go to in Home without having to physically walk to all the areas?

Phil Harrison: You’ve got shortcuts which are built into the virtual PSP. You’ll be able to go to what -- this is a working title – is called the World Map. this is just our internal model. This is still being worked on, but there’ll be search in here, there will be ways to filter, there will be ways to group, there will be ways to identify particular spaces that you want to go to. This will be a lot more sophisticated than what we’re showing at the moment – it was intended just to give a sense of a vast galaxy of connected spaces where you can find a new space and download it, check it out and, if you like it, it’s just like bookmarking a webpage. So you can dictate that the Socom barracks, or whatever, would be your landing point every time you come back into Home.

It’s exactly like a Web browser, but it has a very clever twist, in that when you create the bookmark, it renders a 3D screenshot of the place you were standing when you bookmarked it, and then the next time you come back into Home it will populate a list of favourites. When the service is up-and-running and new spaces are being added on a daily, or even hourly, basis, you’ll want to be able to check back into the world map to see the new spaces that have been added. There’ll be a sort, search and filter control over this, and your friends can also recommend spaces to you.

SPOnG: In terms of the virtual cinema, you talked a lot about trailers, that kind of thing, will you be showing full films in there?

Phil Harrison: No. The best place to show a film is running off the Cross Media Bar. But short clip content yes, user-created content definitely and possibly news and daily programming.

SPOnG: But no TV shows?

Phil Harrison: I wouldn’t say no TV shows, but I don’t think you would want to stand there for an hour watching a TV show when the best way is to watch it from the Cross Media Bar.

SPOnG: But I assume that’ll be linked, if the film is available, on the online store, then there’ll be a one-click buy?

Phil Harrison: That’s exactly the intention. You would be able to preview something in the preview theatre and then link to the store to be able to download it, exactly right.

SPOnG: Do you think different types of PS3 owners will use Home in different ways, maybe hang out in different places? Can you give examples? I can see the hardcore guys sort of maybe spending more time in the private apartments than the public areas for example.

Phil Harrison: Absolutely. We’re creating a platform, and populating that platform with a few content ideas ourselves, but ultimately we want to democratise it and allow anybody to build spaces in Home, and those would be the kind of extremes of experience that you would get on the platform anyway. There might be a SpongeBob space in Home, and there might be a Killzone space, and you know, everything in between.

I think that when non-game brands come into the space as well and offer particular themed areas which appeal to particular groups of people – girls as well as boys, older people as well as younger people – then you’ll start to see that difference be more pronounced.