During Sony’s keynote at the Tokyo Games Conference in 2006, the former head of Playstation, Ken Kutaragi, briefly mentioned his vision for the PS3 and specifically talked about a global mapping system for the PS3 (see our previous post here). Last week in Tokyo, Sony held a strategy meeting open to the press, where they showed video previews of 2 upcoming Sony products that are part of this vision of an interconnected local and global virtual world. Since I was trapped in North Carolina without broadband access, I didn’t get a chance to post about it until now. The first preview, for Home, has already gotten a lot of attention and is currently in closed beta with a release later this year. The second demo, however, is much more interesting and I had not heard anything about it until now. It is called the Life With Playstation service, and seems to be a virtual globe application with real-time web services. Over at Digital World Tokyo, you can see the brief video demos for Home and Life With Playstation (the second video). Since the audio is in Japanese, I wasn’t able to get the particulars that were being discussed with the video. Still, it looks pretty cool, and is part of a growing interest in offering virtual globe applications and web services through networked gaming consoles.

Via techradar