Having initially saw a 10 second clip on the bbc news I was initially very dissmissive, however having watched a proper walkthrough demo from the GDC (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7pk0QMfN6s), I couldn't help but to be a little impressed.
So for starters, graphically this looks much more how you would expect a Virtual World to look. The motion is smooth, the colours are vivid and generally it's a much more appealing environment. Worth bearing in mind that this is obviously aided by having a standardised platform to run on (the PS3), and that the video is from a conference demo so the paths through the world may have been carefuly crafted, so no dodgy user created content that you may experience in SL. But, on the whole the experience seems very engaging.
But, the one thing I've not seen a decent demo of yet is how easy it is to create content. The GDC video shows some basic customizations of avatar and prefab buildings, but no demo (that I've found), yet for some serious content generation. The promise of SDKs and Maya tie-in certainly sounds very promising, but whether this will be as accessible to the average user as Second Life is at the moment remains to be seen Features such as sharing your media files easily between friends is a very cool idea, as is the ability to extend the game experience by having your personal hall of fame available. So maybe the ability to take a simply build and customize it yourself is the right model to reach the myspace / facebook generation, it seems like a good fit. But for business to start adopting we're going to need a whole lot more capability for bulding and customization. Beta starts next month, so lets see what happens.
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