How HOME can get a jumpstart

With the recent rips on Playstation Home, I decided that there was a couple things that I would love to see Sony do. Truthfully, having followed Sony’s marketing and design since the 1980s, I realize that they’re one of those companies that don’t really listen to what their customers want and barely fix what they have out there (I can name multiple devices that I’ve had faulty firmware that didn’t get updated for years on end).

So here are three ideas that blur the lines between virtual worlds and reality that would make Home a better place given the current framework.

Use the friend communication system for a Roger Wilco type of channel for ANY game
Having been in a Team Fortress and Weapons Factory Arena clan that were ranked, I can tell you that pretty much every single team based game has practices and run offensive and defensive voice channels. Well, here’s the thing. Why can’t Home be a place where you start out and go to whatever game. It would bring a whole new level of gaming with your friends and very similar to team based gaming. I think it actually would also make a lot of sense for games like mmorpgs (think WoW raids) where you need coordination. Voice channels are perfect for that, and Home could definitely exploit it.

Movie rentals, but everyone splits movie rentals
Think about it. When I rented a movie in college, I would want to watch it with my friends. We would probably settle in with some microwave popcorn and get a bunch of beanbag chairs and such together and split the cost of the movie and drinks and such. Why couldn’t a group of friends split the cost of say…. a HD streaming rental? You couldn’t do a 24 or 48 hour one but more of like… it’s a split cost and you had to all be in the same Studio or private area and watch from the “big screen” that someone had in their home. That way, you couldn’t really cheat with the rental costs and would only truly have friends there. If you come late, you enter the movie from wherever they were streaming at. Overall initiator has control to pause the movie and such, but that’s about it. I think that would be definitely blurring the lines of reality and virtual which would be really interesting concept for Sony.

Food Delivery
The one thing that I always though was missing in Second Life as far as the large branding campaigns were the issues that arose with virtual and reality. Sure you saw Geek Squad there. But so what? The big disconnect was trying to play the virtual world into your actual reality. But what if you could order in Home just as you do online? For pizza, wings, or whatever else that delivered? That would not only be blurring the lines between a technology and current, but it would make it so that brand recognition and marketing a brand is actually a useful commodity within Home. This provides not only Sony with just a development role, but also it provides their brand partners with something more than just a “virtual presence”.

Overall, I think that these three things would not be far fetched to actually accomplish given the current framework of Home. There’s a lot more that can be done actually. But it would definitely be a start to making Home actually worthwhile.