The PS Vita is the successor to the PSP, which sold more than 71 Million Units worldwide. It goes on sale on the 22nd February, and in anticipation of the launch, we take a quick look at what the next generation of portable console has to offer.
The Vita eschews a purely touchscreen interface, instead going for a combination of touchscreen and buttons. The standard Sony interface from the PSP remains, being the D-pad, Circle-Square-Triangle-X buttons, and left and right shoulder buttons, but the PS Vita also has a 5 inch capacitive touchscreen, left and right sticks, and a rear touch pad. There is also a Six-axis motion sensing system, based off a three-axis gyroscope and three-axis accelerometer, and a three-axis electronic compass. In addition on the 3G model, it has built in GPS.
The Vita retains the wi-fi of the PSP, but adds bluetooth. There is also a front and rear camera, stereo speakers and a microphone. Battery lifespan is 3-5 hours of gameplay, up to 5 hours of videoplay, and up to 9 hours music if used with the screen off.
PSP games digitally released on the Playstation Network will be playable on the PS Vita, as well as PlayStation minis, PlayStation Suite games, PSOne Classics and other content from the PlayStation Store. The Vita's dual analog sticks will be supported on selected PSP games, and graphics for PSP releases will be up-scaled, with a smoothing filter to reduce pixelation. Titles announced so far include many Playstation franchises, such as Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Killzone, and LittleBigPlanet. There will also be apps available soon, for free, for Twitter, Skype and Facebook.
Wide Area Augmented Reality, or WAAR, is a new feature for the PS Vita, and honestly, its one of those simple ideas that is genius. It's Augmented Reality and then some. Normally, AR requires an anchor, usually a symbol that the AR locks onto and projects over. WAAR can handle multiple anchors (the Vita will come with 6 such cards) which you can move to adjust your game area – think a race track around your office or living room, where you can ad a chicane just by moving a piece of paper in the real world. You can also work without an anchor. Talking to John McLaughlin from SCE Worldwide Studios, he liked to stand on top of a building, face down, and then create 50 foot tall fighters duking it out on the street between the buildings; conversely, I got to drop a couple of pint sized fighters on the table in front of me. WAAR will be open to 3rd party developers, so this technology is going to see a lot of unusual applications and strange new ideas, and I think a big thing will be a deluge of simple but addictive games. The 60 frames a second refresh rate is more than enough to provide smooth and consistent animation overlay.
The only drawback for me was that as a portable device, the controls have been shrunk down to fit the platform, and felt small. The control sticks were more like bumps. I'm sure in time you'll get used to it, but that, and the unexpected rear track pad, meant I was often touching more buttons at once than I wanted.
Will Vita be big? Its hard to say in the current economy, but all Playstation products have a long shelf life, and releasing at €249 for the basic model, €299 for the 3G model (available on Vodafone), it's a lot cheaper than many smartphones.
Speaking of smartphones, the Vita has been compared to the iPhone and iPad as a mobile gaming platform. According to Niall O'Hanrahan, MD of Sony Computer Entertainment, the comparison to smartphone gaming is an oversimplified, and ultimately inaccurate one. There are a number of features common to both, but smartphones are phones with gaming added on, while the Vita is for specifically designed for gaming, and gamers. He was explaining that the Vita will allow you to connect to other Vita's around you with a limit of 8, but it will keep searching until it reaches that limit – and that during trials in Ireland, he was able to connect from Dublin to one of his sales reps in Carlow. There will also be the ability to connect certain functions of your PS3 and Vita together, allowing for seamless gaming.
the Vita has a lot of features that individually would be a selling point. In an era when naysayers are announcing the death of consoles to cloud and mobile gaming, the Vita is a fairly decent counter-arguement for dedicated gaming platforms. Plus, WAAR allows you to indulge that childhood fantasy of watching action heroes fighting up and down O'Connell Street without requiring a Hollywood budget.
