Home Alone 3

I really don't want to harp on Sony's PS3 Home.  It sounds kind of interesting, but in the grand scheme of things not as important as the impending onslaught of XNA-related goodies.

That said, this Joystiq article caught my attention:

For starters, O'Luanaigh lauded the Home Development Kit Sony has created as an incredibly robust game-creation engine. Nobody knows about this potential, though, because most developers have spent their time in Home making simple promotional spaces for other games. "We see games as exciting asJoe Danger [coming to Home]," O'Luanaigh said. "It's essentially a great MMO engine."

Wait a minute, Sony has a development kit for Home? Makes sense, it just hadn't occurred to me. I'm going to have to see what I can dig up on this.

Grand Google Canyon

I defy anyone to try the Google mini flight simulator without a certain virtual thrill. I would recommend using the Grand Canyon instead of the default location, though.

Which brings up an interesting question: has anyone used the Google Earth API to create a virtual world?  Or maybe I'm looking at it wrong.  Maybe anything created with Google Earth actually is creating a virtual world, I'm just not used to looking at it that way.

No Place Like Home

Currently, Sony's Play Station Home is the only console-based virtual world.  I would think this is a space that Microsoft would be interested in:  (Virtual Worlds News)

Home features 100 games, an average user session time of 70 minutes, over 50 virtual spaces, 85% repeat users, and 14 million users overall.

That's pretty good.  That 70 minute session time alone would suggest that this is a space that the ad world should be interested in. For that matter, why isn't there interest in the PSP side of Sony to provide a mobile experience?

For that matter, at the point you're providing 100 games I would think someone would create a mobile device whose only function was accessing that virtual space.