Sony has revealed more details about the PlayStation Vita's online modes  - Near, Party, LiveArea and Activity.

"What Near does is it allows users to discover each other, leave gifts for each other and essentially find out more about games. You can see where people are in relation to your location, their five most recently played games and also gifts that they've registered. This is fairly cool because it exposes users to games they might not have heard of and you can see how popular those games are and how people are rating them," explained Sony Europe manager of R&D, Phil Rogers at the Develop Conference 2011.

According to Rogers, “unlike another platform”, Near’s gifts don’t settle down in one place, it follows you around as you “go about your daily life”. Near allots users with one 100KB gift box per game. You can store multiple gifts per box but can’t exceed the 100KB data limit imposed.

"Imagine user A visits locations one to ten through that day, and they get home and sync with the server and it uploads to the Near server your ten locations that you've been to," he explained.

"User B comes along, does the same thing, but at some point in User B's day they passed User A's location five, which means they're now able to collect gifts that that user's dropped. That comes into the Near application and then in-game they pick up those gifts."

Users can specify how many times they can picked up a gift, its availability from your daily locations in terms of relative distance, how long will it lasts, who can access the gift and other players chances of finding it. A rare item might only discovered by one lucky user out of 100 people.

"You can gift challenges," Rogers added, who used the example of a gift that challenges someone in WipEout, offering possible rewards if successful. You can even gift in-game items: "You could have a rare ship and you could drop that and someone could collect that by using Near."

He also added that there will be functionality to write to a gift-giver and say thank you.

Party on the other hand is "really good for having friends together to discuss games, chat about them and get into them", Rogers declared.

Similar to Xbox Live, Party is "platform-wide" and allows Vita users and three friends to form a party that sticks together regardless of what you do on handheld. "You can chat across games through text and voice," Rogers revealed.

"Cross-game voice chat," he reiterated, "it's there and it's on Vita."

Rogers added that you can also launch Vita games from within Party and your friends there can click a button and quickly join you.

"You can have different Party groups for different games or genres," expanded Rogers. "Maybe you've got a first-person shooter group that you can all chat and go into.

"The voice chat part you can override," he added, "so if in-game you've got your own teams for audio then you can override the Party chat and turn that off."

Party is integrated with friends lists but isn't compulsory for all games to include. "Games can choose not to," said Rogers.   

Now onto the LiveAarea and Activity feature of the handheld. According to Rogers, "the LiveArea is essentially where you go to launch your PlayStation Vita day."

It will have three modes: Index, Live and Game. On the top area you'll see is the content information zone, which is the "landing point for when you start any game on PS Vita". The communication zone is where you "comment on people's activities within the game as well as publish your messages".

"Activity is a way for players to discuss progress," explained Rogers. "The system automatically puts a few activities in there," he added, such as Trophies and ratings. "That encourages people to then comment similar to Facebook style."

LiveArea can be updated by developers and publishers. "When you ship the game it's got the standard LiveArea that you bake into the game card," said Rogers. But through updates "you can even customise it to the user" by pushing out different data.

Rogers added that publishers can also "push data to users" by putting images on the LiveArea frontpage as well as announcements on the bottom part of the logo. "It's a good way to push DLC," said Rogers. "So there's new levels out, click, go to the Store." It's also a good way to push news about the game. But Rogers offered a word of warning to publishers that "it's important not to spam users too much and to use it sensibly".

LiveArea also has location features and allows publishers and developers to track Vita owners "either by GPS on the 3G model or triangulation of mobile phone cells".

"As well as that we work with Skyhook and they provide wireless access points around to keep a general idea of where you are," elaborated Rogers. "So even with the Wi-Fi-only SKU you can still have a vague concept of where the user is."

Rogers concluded they still doesn’t have a concrete idea how developers will utilize all these features, saying, "we're generally open to innovation."

Sony recently stated that the PlayStation Vita is their "easiest platform" yet. It is slated to arrive later this year.

Via [Eurogamer]

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