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Speaking at this year’s Develop Conference, Sony Europe’s R&D manager Phil Rogers explained how the PS Vita could be used as a controller for the PlayStation 3.
“Here’s a few boring technical ideas: you could drive a display from a PS3 game” Rogers explained during the conference.
“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.
“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.”
These features will be ready in time for launch, Rogers confirmed.
“At launch we’re going to have some PSN features that work across both platforms,” he explained. “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.”
Sony’s upcoming handheld also boasts cross platform play, allowing Vita and PS3 players to play the same game over PSN. I got to experience this first-hand with Wipeout 2048 over at E3.
In addition to this, the handheld will also take advantage of remote play, which allows the Vita to receive encoded video output in real-time from PS3.
More impressive than either of these features is Continuation Play, which allows a PS3 game to be played, saved, and then continued on the move with PS Vita.
“We have a system called Title User Storage, which allows 1MB of data on our servers for games,” Rogers explains. “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 encouraged developers to get in touch with Sony if they had any other ideas on how the Vita could be used to interact with the PS3.
Source: Eurogamer
PS Vita shares many of the capabilities that define the Wii U. Considering the device is fully portable, however, these features might be even more desirable on Sony’s handheld. Continuation Play is particularly interesting, assuming you can have exactly the same experience on your PS3 as you can on the Vita. Time will tell.
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