Though we called out Sony for conspiring to sell our eyeballs to advertisers, we have to admit our curiosity was piqued by the late June announcement of Life with Playstation — a new service for PlayStation 3 that looked to combine the Wii’s Weather and News channels in a Google Earth-like interface.
Today, Life with Playstation goes live, but with one additional feature included — Stanford University’s distributed computing network Folding@home. Users can now potentially go about their morning routine, checking reports from Google News and The Weather Channel, while advancing protein research at the time.
When attempting to launch Folding@home today, you’ll be greeted by the following message:
The latest update data was found.
With this update, Folding@home has been renamed as “Life with Playstation.”
While you are using “Life with PlayStation,” your PS3 system can continue as before to contribute to Stanford University’s Folding@home distributed computing network.
You can still watch the protein-folding simulation in real time from the Folding@home channel.
The service is a 126MB installation on top of Folding@home. We’ve currently checking out all the service’s features (including Remote Play!) and will have full day one impressions up soon.
Full press release follows:
Tokyo, September 18, 2008 – Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) today announced that it would release Life with PlayStation® for PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3®) today, September 18, 2008, worldwide simultaneously. Life with PlayStation is a new lifestyle service that offers users a new visual and interactive way to use their PS3 to access news and information from around the world, only possible on the PS3’s feature-rich platform.
As the initial content, LIVE CHANNEL will be released for Life with PlayStation. Through network connected PS3, it delivers worldwide news and information centering on two themes, “place” and “time” on a world map interface. Some of the live content includes; cloud imagery (provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center), along with weather information (provided by The Weather Channel), news headlines (provided by Google News™), and live camera images (partially provided by The Earth Television Network) of nearly 60 cities around the globe. Through LIVE CHANNEL, PS3 users will be able to enjoy worldwide news and live information free of charge. In addition to LIVE CHANNEL, Life with PlayStation will continually deliver a wide variety of interactive content and channels to living rooms through network connected PS3s to further enhance the world of entertainment made possible by PS3.
PS3 users can easily join Life with PlayStation by simply clicking the Folding@home*1 icon on the network column of XMB ™ (XrossMediaBar) that will update to Life with PlayStation.
With the latest update, Folding@home will support more advanced simulation of protein fold, and will also support PS3 unique Folding@home ranking system, which enable users to see where they stand among the worldwide contributors based on their level of contribution.
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