PlayStation 3 owners can now 'get a life'

Mike Bantick
Friday, 19 September 2008 11:05

Your IT - Entertainment

Life with PlayStation brings the power of some Wii channels to the PS3.  Sony announce a new lifestyle service for their flagship console.

Wii has the Weather and News channels, now PS3 owners can point to their own XMB (XrossMediaBar) and say “we have that too”.

LIVE CHANNEL is the first content release for the Life with PlayStation brand.  According to Sony:

“Through [a] 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 the 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”

To join Life with PlayStation, owners need to flick through the Folding@home icon on the network column of the XMB. 

Folding@Home is the protein folding simulation project run by Stanford University.  Utilising the distributed might of PS3’s amongst other CPU’s around the global, the Uni hopes to understand protein folding/misfolding to help with related disease curative efforts. 

To this date the distributed contribution of PS3’s is providing close to three quarters of the computing power in the process.

Anything to help cure the debilitating effects of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is worthwhile, with this download the Folding@home software is also updated to provide advanced simulation for the project.