We bought an "Eye Toy" for the PlayStation2

A fun little accessory.

Published on May 16, 2004 By Jamie Burnside In Gadgets & Electronics

222

Yesterday, my family was at Toys „` Us. We were shopping for an umbrella stroller, and browsing for some other baby stuff.

While my wife was looking at baby stuff, Kenny and I wandered over to the video game section of the store. In there I found a display of a thing called the Eye Toy.

The Eye Toy is a small camera that connects to the USB port of the PS2. Included with the camera was a disk containing twelve games to play with the camera.

The cool thing about the Eye Toy is that you play games with your own image on the screen. There are games like: window washing, karate fighting, boxing, soccer ball juggling, and dancing. There is also a "Playroom" feature that lets you experiment with a bunch of fun visual effects (carnival mirrors, rainbow effects, time-delay images, and stuff like that) on the TV. (It would be something fun to have plugged-in during a house party.)

The display at the toystore did its job. After playing with the thing for a bit myself, I brought my wife over to have a look. We ended up having a really good time playing a kung-fu game. We came for a stroller, and we left with a stroller and a video game. We brought the game home and have spent some time playing it. It is a lot of fun! I can hardly wait to have a party with it. I can imagine that it will be a lot of fun to play with a group of friends.

Here is my wife having a try at the window washing game.

Comments

Mr_Frog

on May 16, 2004

Cool! I was at WalMart and saw one of those. If I wasn't unemployed and had some 'fun money' to spend, I would have bought it. It would have been a blast with the kids.

-- B

Phil Osborn

on May 16, 2004

Please see my article on this: Link

There was and perhaps is somewhere an actual development kit for the Eyetoy. At least, the Wall Street Journal review some months back said so. But I haven't been able to find it, and Sony doesn't respond to my inquiries, despite their guarantiee to get back within 48 hours.

The concept of the Eyetoy and other implementations have been around since the '70's on university mainframes. In fact, Myron Kreuger's books "Artificial Reality" and "Artificial Reality II" go into great detail on thousands of applications that he tested before he got the patent that covers the entire field. On personal computers, the first implementation was Mandala, from the Vivid Group out of Toronto, in 1986. This was a fully programmable videoplace, all done with the mouse and menus and images, on the Amiga system, selling at one point for $129. It never went anywhere because of the threat of patent lawsuits hanging over their heads from Myron, but it was a fully functional, if somewhat buggy, system, that allowed you to control literally anything the computer could do via your on-screen image. However, if Vivid had made it commercially, instead of remaining a shoe-string operation run by a bunch of artistes, then the lawyers would've been beating a path to Myron's door.

Many rock groups and museums still use versions of Mandala or its clone CyberScape. This scenario has repeated itself probably a dozen times since then. A product that was fun, exciting and had unlimited potential way back in '86 is still hanging fire because of intellectual property disputes.... It will interesting to see if anything gets out of the box this time.

InfoGeek

on May 17, 2004

My kids like the "bubbles" and the "deleayed reaction" settings.

IG

Clonmelchat

on Jun 01, 2004

I bought the eye toy some months ago for my three children 4,3 and 1 and guss what it was the best thing ever. No more cables stretching across the flood and the fear of one child tripping and pulling my Playstation 2 to the ground.
The best thing is watching them dancing and waving their arms around. Anyone looking in the window would think the house was insane. Now! imagine when we adults try it; whats more fun playing or watching?

Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:

Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums.
Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
It's simple, and FREE!