PlayStation Vita Is Packed To The Rafters With Technological Potential. Let's Hope Developers Take Advantage Of It.

Sony explained the potential to Eurogamer at last month's Develop conference.

"What could you do with all of this?" Sony R&D boffin Phil Rogers questioned a room regarding PlayStation Vita's souped-up PS3 compatibility. "Here's a few boring technical ideas: you could drive a display from a PS3 game, for example.

"PS3 can send data down to Vita and Vita can display it. You could use the unique features [of Vita] - gyroscope, touch front and back - as a control device for a PS3 game.

"You can run software on both devices and use the network to sync the game states. And that's pretty good, because you then have the processing power of PS3 doing that work, Vita [doing] fancy graphics - however you want to do it. You're not sacrificing the PS3's CPU to be able to have a rich experience on Vita."

Rogers stressed that it was a new initiative [we can already hear the stampedes of Nintendo fans - Ed] and that developers should chat to Sony if they have any ideas.

Moving onto other areas of PlayStation Vita's integration with PlayStation 3, Rogers explained the benefits of cross-platform play in titles such as Wipeout 2048 and Hustle Kings. Cross-platform play will essentially allow PlayStation Vita players to compete online against PS3 players and vice versa.

"At launch we're going to have some PSN features that work across both platforms," he said. "You could access data on each side and access scoreboards, for example. We're building on that.

"Obviously we had to bring certain things on and make sure that servers work against all the features and it doesn't break the PS3 experience, because there's a lot of PS3 users.

"For launch we'll also have Remote Play, which does look good on Vita - I saw an early version of it running recently."

Also intriguing is Vita's Continuation Play feature, which was demonstrated at E3 in Sony San Diego's Diablo-esque title Ruin. This allows game progress to be transferred between PS3 and Vita.

"We have a system called Title User Storage, which allows 1MB of data on our servers for games. And that can be accessed on both platforms; you can access that same data," Rogers explained.

"You can save your game on PS3, go over to Vita, pull that data back and swap it between them, so you can play a game at home, take it on the train and continue."

Rogers wouldn't talk about any other titles using the feature outside of Ruin, but clarified that there are unannounced titles in development that use the technology.

"The feature is there," he added. "We've told developers that you can use Title User Storage to push the game data across.

"The important thing to note, and people always forget this, is that the Network exists; you don't need fancy cables, you don't need to have that there. You're connected over an access point; send IP to each other - it just works.

"We did support USB, but [there's] not really much more point for that - wireless is fairly decent."

While Sony's not forcing developers to use Vita's interesting technologies, it is encouraging third-parties to consider them.

"There's a push from our third-party team for encouraging licensees to be having those features [cross-platform, continuation play] in game," Rogers concluded.

[Thanks Eurogamer]