Sony has just released Life With PlayStation. The Sony service shows the Earth, and users can access current news and weather for locations around the world. It's possible to even pull up the full article from the headline. This comes as yesterday the service was available for a short time to some PS3 users. Hit the jump for the full press release and info for how it interacts with Folding@Home.

Life With PlayStation(R) Comes to PLAYSTATION(R)3 on September 18, Worldwide

Proposing a New Life Style with PLAYSTATION 3

TOKYO, Sept. 18 — Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) today announced that it would release Life with PlayStation(R) for PLAYSTATION(R)3 (PS3(R)) today, September 18, 2008, worldwide simultaneously. Life with PlayStation is a new lifestyle service that offers users a new visual and interactive way to use their PS3 to access news and information from around the world, only possible on the PS3's feature-rich platform.

As the initial content, LIVE CHANNEL will be released for Life with PlayStation. Through network connected PS3, it delivers worldwide news and information centering on two themes, "place" and "time" on a world map interface. Some of the live content includes; cloud imagery (provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center), along with weather information (provided by The Weather Channel), news headlines (provided by Google News(TM)), and live camera images (partially provided by The Earth Television Network) of nearly 60 cities around the globe. Through LIVE CHANNEL, PS3 users will be able to enjoy worldwide news and live information free of charge. In addition to LIVE CHANNEL, Life with PlayStation will continually deliver a wide variety of interactive content and channels to living rooms through network connected PS3s to further enhance the world of entertainment made possible by PS3.

PS3 users can easily join Life with PlayStation by simply clicking the Folding@home*1 icon on the network column of XMB(TM) (XrossMediaBar) that will update to Life with PlayStation.

With the latest update, Folding@home will support more advanced simulation of protein fold, and will also support PS3's unique Folding@home ranking system, which enables users to see where they stand among the worldwide contributors based on their level of contribution. SCE will vigorously promote the expansion of the world of PS3 by introducing new services that will open up new possibilities and enjoyment in interactive entertainment.

*1 Folding@home is a distributed computing*2 project run by Stanford University which aims to understand protein folding and misfolding, and how these are related to diseases and many forms of cancer. PS3 provides approximately 74% (as of February 2008) of the computing power in Folding@home and over 1 million PS3 users has participated in this project.

*2 Distributed computing is an approach adopted by universities and research laboratories to utilize immense computing power without the use of central supercomputers. Small computing tasks are assigned to each user's computer and the results are collected after computation is complete.

* For more information, please see the official website (http://www.playstation.com/life/).