EL33TONLINE: News tag archive: eyetoy

In a conference at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, Sandy Spangler of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) and one of the lead designers on EyeToy: Play, revealed two titles in development at Sony that will take further advantage of the EyeToy’s motion tracking capabilities.

Currently, the EyeToy tracks player motion by detecting a change in colour of the scene it’s viewing, converting this to game input on the part of the player flapping and waving in front of the camera. The problem comes in when trying to differentiate between specific body parts and using this information to interact with games in a more meaningful way.

What Spangler and co. are working on is using a ‘fluorescent-green foam toy sword’ to play the part of a recognisable object for the camera to track easily, as it is able to track such a uniquely coloured object and its movement. Two projects are currently underway; Pom-Pom Party (presumably involving cheerleading in some fashion) and Hero, a first-person RPG-like game, using the foam sword to act as a real sword in-game.

The technology allows the game to track the toy sword on a 1:1 basis, meaning that every motion performed by the player with the sword will be translated into in-game movement, as opposed to using pre-scripted animations. In Hero, players will be able to use the sword to interact in a variety of ways - including the obvious attack/block gameplay, but also more uniquely - such as a section of gameplay shown involving using the sword as a light beacon, but then having to hide the sword behind your back so that the EyeToy can’t see it, and neither can the monsters.

This is a pretty exciting piece of technology, but will undoubtedly introduce even more peripherals (that approximate real-world items) into your home.

Source: Dark Zero