Sony might be late to the party introducing its own form of virtual community service, but “Home” might end up being a critical element that makes the PS3 more appealing. Today, Phil Harrison disclosed additional details in his keynote address at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California.

Each person can customize their clothes and facial characteristics, with millions of potential combinations.

For me, this wasn’t exactly news after hearing the reports prematurely discussed on Kotaku (and later confirmed by an anonymous industry insider who spoke with The New York Times). Of course, there were a number of things that still wasn’t clear to me – until today. According to what was announced, Home in effect owes a lot of its design from the Wii, Xbox 360 and Animal Crossing.

The process starts out with a user creating their own unique avatar and from there, are free to roam throughout the vast community filled with custom spaces designated to hold game data and personal apartments. To give you a textbook description, users can interact, communicate, join online games, shop, share private content and even build and show off their personal living quarters to other users in real time. In effect, it’s like Animal Crossing 2.0…

Home will offer a “club area” called Game Space (think of a modern PSO lobby) where users can mingle and play casual games like bowling, pool and retro arcade games – all free of charge. Digital content sharing will be a HUGE plus for Home users, allowing the ability to show off personal videos, pictures and any other digital media stores on their PS3 hard drives. Users will have various communication tools via audio/video chat, text and a modest range of emotional animations for each character. Sharing continues in the “Hall of Fame,”? where users can display new 3D trophies that will be unlocked through in-game milestones for the games they own as well viewing the trophies of other users across the PlayStation Network and for other games they’ve yet to purchase.

Home will be offered as a free download service, however users looking to give their virtual characters a distinct look with new threads will have to fork over a bit of green (price was not disclosed at the conference). SCEI will present a large-scale beta later this spring; hopefully I’ll have the chance to participate first-hand.

(Edit: Sony has launched a beta site for the forthcoming Home service. Not much to check out at the moment, so be sure to set up a bookmark on your browser. Link: http://www.homebetatrial.com)…

So — what are your thoughts?

  
[Top] The Games Space is where you can meet and relax with your friends with free casual games such as bowling, pool and retro arcade games.
[Bottom] Snapshots of personal apartments you can live in.