SONY UNVEILS A FREE VIRTUAL WORLD for owners of the PlayStation 3. It’s sort of like Second Life:

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.

Follow the link for photos and video. I have to say, it looks pretty cool. Put this together with Sony’s Internet HDTV project and it’s clear that they’re pushing into the Internet in a big way. The PlayStation 3 still seems kind of hard to get, though.