Home features a handful of little hubs connected to this central meeting area; a Game Space for playing the well-documented games of things like bowling, pool and of course simple arcade games. The Events Space can be completely decked out by publishers or Sony themselves to allow Home users to enter a virtual recreation of real-life events and venues. For example, Ubisoft used the space to showcase their Ubidays offerings, and Sony has used the space twice now, once to showcase an event in London and most recently to stream the E3 press conference to users. In all cases, the Space can be made as interactive and different from any of the other publishers'/developers' projects as they want.

The whole point of these spaces, however, is to bring people together, to get them to actually meet up within Home and then jump into deeper experiences outside of the 3D construct. We were actually shown how this will work with Warhawk, which was recently patched to include all the hooks for Home's extensive matchmaking services.

While Home definitely works as a party system, allowing players to link up and then jump from game to game, we were more interested in the specifics of setting things up. Warhawk will support all the features as soon as Home hits, but some games may still require patches or updates to allow for truly seamless movements from game to game. Luckily, we got a peek at just how easy this is. Using the simple rounded edges and light blue menus of Home, a map could be chosen, as well as all the normal in-game options needed to set up a server.

After everything was confirmed, the player simply announces that he has a game ready to go (indicated by a little icon over his head), other players can walk up to him and hit X to link up, and once enough people are in (controls over who is joining can also be pulled up allowing for bans or quick messaging before the game starts), a five second countdown ticks away and then everyone is shunted instantly into the game.

If anyone has tried using some of the multitasking features of the new in-game XMB, you'll know that switching games is entirely possible, but it requires a slight pause while jumping back to the XMB before switching to the new game. Home has none of this; it's extremely quick, pulling up the familiar PlayStation 3 chime and logo before skipping through all of the usual intro graphics (pausing only for the required End User License Agreement okay) and then right into a created server, where everyone else was pulled in.

Because everything was set up in Home first, there was no bouncing back to the XMB and no configuration that was needed inside Warhawk; the system merely stored location data about the players/friends and where they were in Home and then moved instantly into the game. Quitting out of the game was just as seamless, with only a pause to jump back into the same Warhawk meeting room in Home before everyone else joined in. To see it all working that smoothly gave us plenty of hope that the party system will be every bit as effortless as was hinted at during GDC 2007 all those months ago.

Home is still coming. Sony is adamant that they will get out an open beta by the end of the year to allow people to check it out, and as Sony Head Honcho Jack Tretton mentioned at the E3 press conference, they feel Home will be well worth it once it finally does launch to the masses. Until then, we'll continue to update you on the progress of things, and if what we were shown briefly ends up being the tip of the iceberg, then there may will be reason to get excited for Home all over again.