Life With Playstation

Earlier today I was playing with the new Life with PlayStation which is available as a free upgrade to the older “Folding @ Home” application that originally shipped with the PS3.
The new application looks like it is a step towards generalizing the existing interface, which is a “Google Earth-lite” style zoomable, pannable, 3D globe albeit with much less detail than its desktop equivalent. The main new feature is integrated weather reports and news feeds from the capital cities of 60 countries. You can read more about it on the website and watch a video demo.
What intrigued me was the possibility that Sony may decide to open this up further. They’re clearing expecting there to be more “channels”, which is their term for overlays that can be displayed on the globe. At present only the news, plus the older Folding@Home channels are available, but it’d be fantastic if this was opened up to web hackers to allow geo apps to be delivered directly to the Playstation. I’ve done some googling around but there’s doesn’t seem to be any discussion about how they intend to add new services, or whether there may be a developer kit.
There is a huge amount of creative work going on in the world of geo-hackery that could be re-targetted for delivery to the PS3 if Sony decide to embrace open-ness. Indeed, other than the currently fairly limited resolution of the map and the need for Sony to provide a way to feed content into their system, there seems to be little in the way of further obstacles.
I also noticed that the software license page explains that the application ships with a “simple cross-platform XML parser” and LiteSQL. An even more exciting leap would be to see a sandboxed Javascript engine in there too, but lets not run before we can walk!