The folks over at the PS.Blog have spilled some more info on the news/weather service Life With PlayStation, revealing that it will be integrated with the Folding@Home distributed computing project so that you’ve actually got something to do while letting your PS3 cure cancer.
More info awaits if ye should follow the link, at your peril… Muhuhahahahaha!
For the uninitiated, Life With PlayStation is almost akin to a hybrid of the Wii’s News and Weather channels, combined with custom soundtracks. Rothbart even did a nice little piece on it a while back which you can check out here if you feel this article is lacking in witty reportage.
In essence, it means you can spin a nice big high-def rendering of the Earth around while checking out news stories and the weather while listening to music. Save for a pretty render of the globe, it’s essentially what you can do through the Xross Media Bar anyway and it’s something I’ve been doing for an age and a half already.
However, the new PlayStation.Blog entry has revealed some more details on the service making the whole thing that little, teeny-tiny bit more intriguing. For one, Life With PlayStation will be absolutely free. It will cost you nothing, just like the Wii News and Weather channels. Also, as Rothbart previously hoped for, the service will – if I’m reading into this correctly – provide real-time graphical updates on weather so you can see rain clouds drifting over where you live on a (and I quote) “visually stunning and interactive global map”.
Perhaps even more intriguingly, the blog entry has revealed that Life With PlayStation will be merged with Folding@Home, the Stanford University-led distributed computing project designed to simulate the biological process of protein folding and examine how ‘misfolding’ can lead to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer. In other words, the next iteration of Folding@Home will essentially become Life With PlayStation. For people like me, this is pretty good news.
As I said a paragraph or two up there, I use my PS3 to read up on the news and check the weather on a daily basis. I’m also a pretty heavy user of Folding@Home, racking up the work units day-by-day whenever I’m not using the console myself. Taking both and mashing them up together makes me a pretty happy chappy, as long as I’m not forced to use the utterly terrible ‘mini’ music control panel that firmware 2.40 coughed up to control my music; I’d quite like to pause a song rather than stop it completely.
Despite confirming (the lack of) pricing and giving us more reason to use the thing (or even if you don’t want to, still making Folding@Home that little bit more exciting to use if you’re really, really bored) there’s still no word on a release date, but we’re being assured that it’s very soon. Still, I’m kinda excited; it’d be nice to combine the two main non-gaming things I do with my PS3 into one.
Life with PlayStation is on its way – PlayStation.Blog
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I’m so happy.
power to the people! down with cancer!
Sounds like a step towards making Folding@Home more enticing (though for me the most enticing thing would be to allow me to watch videos while I fold as that’s what I use the PS3 for most apart from gaming), but was it ever actually confirmed that we were getting Life? I remember it being announced in North America but don’t recall anybody saying it was going further.