Wake-up Club for Vita Gamifies Your Morning

With recent introductions like PlayStation Mobile, it's obvious that Sony is experimenting a little with the slow-moving Vita. One example is a new application called Wake-up Club, which is coming to the PlayStation Store in North America on Tuesday (15^th January).

Wake-up Club is essentially an alarm clock, which is the first time the Vita will actually have that functionality at all. But more than that, it's a support group for chronic over-sleepers. The idea is that you set your alarm time and the app matches you up with eleven other Vita owners who happened to set their alarms at the same time as you.

Once your alarm sounds, your avatar for the app starts to bounce around the screen and you have to tap it to let other members of your wake-up club know you're awake. I guess having to play a little mini game to turn off your alarm (or at least make others aware you're awake before they start hassling you) is one way to encourage you to open your eyes in the morning. When you've let your buddies know you're awake, you'll get access to the virtual club room, and you can see who else has risen and who is still snoozing. If you tap a sleeping player's avatar, it'll “cheer” them on.

If you ignore the alarm and keep snoozing yourself, other members of your club will start to appear on your screen. You then have to swipe them away and tap your own avatar to join them.

There are also club records so you can see who has most often succeeded in waking up within five minutes, the average time it takes you to wake up, and more. And there are trophies.

Bizarre futuristic technology the likes of which you would have expected to read about in old-fashioned science fiction, or a clever and useful way to use your Vita console?