PlayStation Eye: More than an Eye of Judgment Accessory
By Chris on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 9:52 AM PST In Games, Hardware, Sony, Sony
The Eye of Judgment is set for release later this month, and along with it comes the bundled PlayStation Eye camera, pictured above. A post on the official PlayStation.Blog site has gone into some detail on what makes the Eye different from the PlayStation 2’s EyeToy and why it’ll be sold as a standalone product, too.
PlayStation Eye was engineered from the onset to perform well in low-light conditions. It also has a 2-setting zoom lens (normal and wide angle) with fixed focus. What does that mean? Well, a lot less fussing around than previous cameras. PlayStation Eye gets a sharp, clear picture at 640 x 480 resolution at 60 frames per second (at 320 x 240 it looks even better at 120 fps)! It picks up image and motion in varying light conditions and doesn’t need your help to focus.
Also in the Eye is a built-in microphone (a 4-microphone array, no less) which apparently negates any need for a headset, as it allows you to speak normally and use it for voice chat. In addition to the ability to video chat with the Eye, there will be free content available on the PlayStation Network – with more to come – that will let you play around with the Eye. (I’m starting to feel like I’m talking about Lord of the Rings.) One such piece of software will be EyeCreate, a free download, which will let you save, edit and share your videos, pictures, and audio clips. More information on EyeCreate will be released later this week.
Games other than The Eye of Judgment will use it, as well. SingStar will let you make your own music videos, which you can then in turn share with others online.
Sounds like a nice package. Of course, we’ll have to see if the Eye ultimately turns out to be something worth happening, which is something you can’t really say about the Xbox Live Vision Camera. The standalone PlayStation Eye will be available starting October 23 for $39.99.
“SingStar will let you make your own music videos, which you can then in turn share with others online.”
If people can rate them you will be able to watch the best and more importantly worst performances. I have a feeling that will be very popular. They could give prizes (PSN credit) and awards (to put in your space on Home). I really do feel that the community on the PS3 will be huge with Home and things like this and LittleBigPlanet.
SingStar is insanely popular in Europe, and if they had the feature to do that I imagine it would be pretty big here, too. But the blog post I source in this story said you can share with (something along the lines of) “family and friends,” suggesting maybe you can only share with those on your friends list. Hopefully that isn’t the case.
“But the blog post I source in this story said you can share with (something along the lines of) “family and friends,” suggesting maybe you can only share with those on your friends list. Hopefully that isn’t the case.”
They should have a YouTube like section in Home where you could rate performances. I have no interest in playing singstar but I do want to laugh at people who do
I did read somewhere that there was going to be a function with this camera and Home where you could upload straight to YouTube which sounds good. Maybe upload replays from games, Singstar videos and so on and embed the vids into your page/Home.