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Comparable to Second Life, PlayStation Home is a virtual community of PS3 owners living together in both public and private environments. Users will be able to login, chat with both text and speech and play casual games together such as pool, bowling and even embedded arcade machines. And when the old stand-bys grow stale, users can invite one another into other PlayStation Network titles outside of PlayStation Home.

Every user will have their own virtual apartment to decorate with furniture, their trophies from various games (see: achievements) and content from their own PS3s. For example, Phil Harrison took a snapshot of us in the crowd, slapped it onto a USB stick and right into a picture frame in his virtual flat. Not content at just images, users will also be allowed to share both music and videos with friends inside their private homes, which will most likely lead to some sort of underground pornography syndicate on the PlayStation Network.

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some answers...

Q: How will the Hall of Fame rewards program be implemented?
A: Users receive points for in-game achievements. More details regarding this will be made available closer to launch.

Q: What is the function of the Home central lobby and what is the maximum number of users in a lobby?
A: The Home central lobby is the central meeting place where you can meet new friends or arrange to meet old friends, before transferring to a private meeting place. The current maximum number of concurrent users in a single lobby is 64, but there will be a multitude of lobbies active at any given time for users to explore.

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# Apartments are just the start. They're working on homes, gardens, and "neighbourhoods".

# Users will never be in an empty lobby - new lobbys will be spawned, like in an MMO, when the population hits 64, but they'll always be done so that a user is in a busy lobby, not sitting alone and despondant on the steps of the place, sobbing into his hands with despair.

# While there's a low limit on the number of people you can have in your apartment (16), they're working on "clan rooms" which fall between a room and the lobby, and can accomodate larger groups of people.

# The Sixaxis can be used for gesture controls. Phil gives a cute little wave as an example - wave the Sixaxis and your avatar will wave.

# Harrison says they'd like to explore having 3rd-party publishers use your Home avatar in games.

# The 3D space Home is built on is being worked on in London, but draws on tech coming out of San Diego and Tokyo, making it a worldwide collabo.

# Home was originally conveived as a graphical lobby system for the PS2's online component, but when they thought it was too awesome for that, they decided to save it for the PS3.