Last night, Sony officially unveiled the PlayStation Home service, and it basically confirms a lot of what was said before. 1up has coverage of the new service, and from a high level, it is Sony’s attempt to tap into online game matchmaking, the success of Nintendo’s Mii avatars, and online content generation, all in one service. A high level description really doesn’t do the service justice for what a user can accomplish with the free online service, but 1up gives some great details about how PlayStation Home will operate along with a number of screenshots. More details are being revealed by Sony’s Phil Harrison at the keynote of the GDC.

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From an avatar standpoint, it looks like Nintendo’s Mii application to the next level. Avatars are realistic representations of people, not simplified cartoon characters; a lot of Mii’s appeal is the simplicity of the tool and hopefully Sony’s avatar tool will keep this simplicity while opening up greater customization. Sony goes further beyond that by allowing users to customize their home space as an apartment that can be furnished and changed to a user’s liking.

From a matchmaking standpoint, Sony looks to be trying to move Microsoft’s Xbox Live transactions to a more interactive state by representing online users as figures in a lobby rather than lists of usernames and gamerpics. From what gamers have heard from game developers in the past, though, it seems like existing games won’t be able to make use of this framework easily, so receiving notifications in-game would seem to be reliant on game specific implementation. Still, this is a great step up from Sony’s current network matchmaking state and if Sony can get the development kits to game developers quickly, one should anticipate that a great number of future games will integrate into this architecture. Overall, the new service shows a lot of promise, and really shows that Sony is getting serious into making inroads into the online world. Hopefully, Sony can deliver on their promises and give Microsoft and Nintendo some strong competition.