Sony EyeToy

~ the eulogy ~

the eyetoy was a usb webcam that clipped to the top of a television, plugged into the front of a playstation 2, and tracked your arms in front of the screen. richard marks at sony research had been working on the underlying computer-vision pipeline since 1999. it shipped in europe on 4 july 2003, in north america four months later, in japan in february 2004. the launch bundle came with eyetoy: play, a minigame collection that asked you to wash a virtual window or throw boxing punches by waving at the camera.

sony sold 10.5 million units between launch and november 2008. that put it in the top tier of console peripherals for the ps2 generation and made it, for a window, the largest motion-tracking gaming product in the world. the wii remote did not ship until december 2006. the kinect did not ship until november 2010. for three years the eyetoy was the only mass-market motion controller in any living room.

i was not in that living room. the eyetoy was a couch peripheral for a family-room ps2 in a us or european home, the kind of device that came out at christmas as a party-game accessory for kids. by 2003 i was on a desk machine in ankara playing counter-strike at the internet cafe with a normal mouse and keyboard. console motion gaming was not a category that reached me, the same way it did not really reach most of turkey at the time.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

eyetoy: play was the killer app, in the sense that it was the only app most owners ever played. the camera read color blobs against the room background, then mapped them to gameplay zones. wave your hand fast enough across a virtual window and the soap streaks went away. the technology was real, the games were thin. 28 titles were ever made for the platform across five years, and the post-launch lineup never matched the bundle's first-impression demo.

the eyetoy also got used as a regular ps2 webcam for the playstation 2 online service, which was small and short-lived. some homebrew code routes opened it up as a pc webcam over usb. as a piece of hardware it was solid, as a product line it had nowhere obvious to go once the novelty of waving at the screen wore off.

~ what it influenced ~

nintendo's wii remote in december 2006 made the eyetoy look quaint within a year of the wii's launch. the wii moved motion gaming from "a camera that reads your silhouette" to "a controller with accelerometers and an ir sensor bar", which was a more reliable signal and a more obvious game-design target. the eyetoy stopped getting new releases. by november 2008 sony had moved on to the playstation eye for ps3, a higher-resolution successor that anchored the eventual playstation move launch in 2010.

the playstation move did not match the kinect or the wii in install base. the eyetoy line therefore peaked in 2004 and never had a successor that landed at scale. the camera-as-controller idea kept appearing in vr headsets, in mobile ar, in the kinect itself, and most of those products died too. the eyetoy was first by a wide margin, and the category it opened mostly ended up smaller than the press of 2003 made it sound.

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