1:02pm, March 14th 2007

ThreeSpeech @ ThreeRooms

Last night I got the chance to go along to ThreeSpeech’s event at the PlayStation ThreeRooms in London.

It’s basically a massive swanky pad, crammed with ubercoolische interior design, a big free bar, Piles of Blu Ray movies littering shelves, PSPs in toilets that play music at you, oh - and lots of 52” 1080P Bravia TVs. And of course, PlayStation3s.
Kind of like Sonys vision for the digitally connected future home (perhaps without the PSPs in the loo, mind…)

They invite lots of people along to come play games and see PlayStation3s functionality. There are lots of photos on the wall of various people who’ve been and gone - Celebrities, Magazines, Humble gamers and even local primary school kids. It’s quite a good bit of PR.

During the evening there was an exclusive demo session with Phil Harrison, followed by a brief Q&A session. He showed everyone a live demo of Home, and talked extensively about the features available to users and developers. The demos of media sharing were very cool. He took a photo of us sitting in the room, popped the memory stick in and within seconds the photo was in a picture frame placed in his ‘Home apartment’. In another room, he placed a bravia TV on the wall, then made a Casino Royale trailer play on it (it has proximity related audio which was very nice too) and then picked up the TV and threw it down some stairs - with the video continually playing. Looked very silly but everything worked fine.

After that he demoed with 3 other SCEE peeps the rather awesome LittleBigPlanet. Which really was great. It’s so cute! And so much fun to watch, let alone play. Phil pointed out that it’s “one of the few games that’s as good to watch as it is to play“. I took some video.

During the Q&A - which was quite short, I managed to get two questions in.

Is the lobby size of 64 users in Home ever likely to be increased?
He pretty much answered no, saying that if a lobby gets full, new lobbies are, rather obviously, just spawned to cope with extra users. He also said that physically, existing lobbies appear rather crowded when you’ve got 64 people walking around talking to each other. Although in an answer to another question, he did say that it may be possible to increase the user cap on rooms where media sharing is not enabled.

When will the PS3’s remote play functionality be available from outside the home?
This was one question I had to ask - and one of the major reasons I wanted a PS3 in the first place, it’s a really great piece of media functionality. I missed this question in the Q&A but managed to ask him afterwards. He said “Remote Play from wireless hotspots? It’s included in the 1.6 update“. It’s an awesome feature - allowing you to access any photo, video or audio media stored on your PS3 at home, using your PSP, from anywhere in the world. Nice.

There was lots of other interesting information revealed too, probably a bit too much to take in but Phil did state that the number of working BC titles on the newer PS3 hardware is now at 1200 and rising steadily.

I managed to take some pics and some video, although for some reason my camera decided to tell me my brand new batteries were flat. Typical…