We’re sure this announcement was in no way meant to counter consumer expectations for the Wii U’s tablet controller. Sony Europe Research and Development head Phil Rogers explained at the Develop Conference how the upcoming Playstation Vita can be used as a controller and peripheral unit for the PS3.
“PS3 can send data down to Vita and Vita can display it. You could use the unique features [of Vita] – gyroscope, touch front and back – as a control device for a PS3 game,” Rogers detailed, “You can run software on both devices and use the network to sync the game states. And that’s pretty good, because you then have the processing power of PS3 doing that work, Vita [doing] fancy graphics – however you want to do it. You’re not sacrificing the PS3’s CPU to be able to have a rich experience on Vita.”
“At launch we’re going to have some PSN features that work across both platforms,” added Rogers. “You could access data on each side and access scoreboards, for example. We’re building on that. Obviously we had to bring certain things on and make sure that servers work against all the features and it doesn’t break the PS3 experience, because there’s a lot of PS3 users…For launch we’ll also have Remote Play, which does look good on Vita – I saw an early version of it running recently.”
“We have a system called Title User Storage, which allows 1MB of data on our servers for games. And that can be accessed on both platforms; you can access that same data. You can save your game on PS3, go over to Vita, pull that data back and swap it between them, so you can play a game at home, take it on the train and continue,” Rogers stated, “The important thing to note, and people always forget this, is that the Network exists; you don’t need fancy cables, you don’t need to have that there…You’re connected over an access point; send IP to each other – it just works. We did support USB, but [there’s] not really much more point for that – wireless is fairly decent.”
Sony did not announce any more upcoming titles to use these various cross-platform features, although Elder Geek expects Konami to expand at least part of its Transfarring technology onto the new handheld. The Playstation Vita is rumored to be launching on October 28th, 2011.
(via Eurogamer)
Could cross-platform play be a Vita selling point? What games would you like to see utilize the technology? Give us your thoughts below!
Well I think cross-platform gaming will be a selling point. Wipeout 2048 is a Sony first party game to be utilizing this as well as Dragon’s Crown made by Vanillaware.
I was kinda hoping to see this technology used with the PSP as I would have bought one for that, but now the Vita is looking a lot more appealing for that. Oh, and 1MB of transfecting data is pretty weak, as one save file can be that big. 1GB is a much better idea.
That would be one heck of a pricey controller haha, but it’s cool that games could be played across PSVita and PS3 online or maybe co-op.
It’ll be a big selling point I think.