The PlayStation 4 Feature that Could Sell a Pile of PS Vitas (If It Works)

Play PS4 games remotely, anywhere you have an Internet connection.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=VWplhhktgqs]

I never cared much for Remote Play between the PlayStation 3 and PSP. The PSP never had enough screen, and the mismatched controls — a single thumb nub supplanting two raised thumbsticks — could be janky. That, and I play on smaller, dedicated monitors, so I’ve never had to fight my wife for our big-screen.

I’ve been assuming the PlayStation 4 version is just a friendlier version of this, the control asymmetry rectified and the Vita’s 5-inch OLED screen less of an eyesore. I somehow missed the part about cloud-based Remote Play.

Forgive the overenthusiastic antics of the actors in the new video spot from Sony PlayStation Japan above and focus on what they’re doing, starting at about the 1:00 mark, where the girl’s playing Knack, then notices an alert (class time!) on her phone, grabs one of these thinner, lighter PS Vitas just announced, then dashes off.

After class, sitting in a school lounge (at about 1:25), she pulls the Vita out and taps a connection button, prompting her Vita to route through the local Wi-Fi network and across the interwebs to her PS4 at home. With a little Gaikai cloud-based streaming magic, the PS4 outputs video to the Vita and lets her seamlessly resume hammering the bejesus out of things in Knack.

That, my friends, is pretty freaking cool, if it works as demonstrated. If it doesn’t, say it’s riddled with latency issues or connection hiccups (bearing in mind you’re at the mercy of mercurial routers and servers and your siblings illicitly torrenting who knows what), then boo hiss. But in theory, how cool might this be — and talk about a Vita selling point — if Sony pulls it off?