Sony Reveals Online Modes For PS Vita


Sony has revealed 4 online modes and services for the PS Vita, the modes have been called Near, Party, LiveArea and Activity. Read On for more details about the 4 services!


Near: has been described as a "Location based gifting system"  Phil Rogers, Sony Europe manager of R&D has said 


"You can see where people are in relation to your location, their five most recently played games and also gifts that they've registered," Rogers told Develop 2011 attendees. "This is fairly cool because it exposes users to games they might not have heard of and you can see how popular those games are and how people are rating them."


Party: Party is a feature which allows you to have some sort of "Face-time" or "Skype" service which allows cross gaming voice chat, its basically a portable version of the XBOX Live Party System.


LiveArena: "where you go to launch your PS Vita day" Rogers revealed. LiveArea will have three modes, Index, Live and Game, and will be the landing point when starting any game. It's a place to access information from devs, comment on the activities of others and publish your own messages. Though all PSVita games will ship with a standard version of LiveArea baked in, game developers can push updates to their LiveAreas and create a unique user experience for gamers. LiveArea also packs location-tracking and can record your location via WiFi or 3G. Sony says it's 'open to innovation' when it comes to how developers want to use this feature."


And Finally Activity: Activity is a service which merges assets like trophies and game ratings as a reason for discussion.


Overall all these features seem to give the PS Vita a "Facebook" sort of feel, it also incorporates features from its console predecessors such as "Party Chat", Personally i think the reason for all this social networking add-ons is because of influence from the Nintendo 3DS, as it has some similar networking features such as StreetPass and Spotpass.

 
                     
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