Eye Toy: Kinetic unveiled

The Eye Toy: Kinetic, unveiled at this year's EIEF, is perhaps the most unusual angle that you could take Sony's Eye Toy in but one that really might work well and breath fresh life back into those old Eye Toy cameras that are cluttering up the TV stand. Careful examination of previous Eye Toy titles made SCEE London Studio realise that all of the frenetic hand waving could be applied for some useful purpose greater than getting a heavy dose of RSI. Given the popularity of fitness videos featuring every half-witted celebrity prepared to put their name to the contract, Sony believes that virtual training, or Physical Gaming, could prove a unique combination of fitness and playing. A huge amount of corporate sponsorship from Nike Motionworks later and the Eye Toy: Kinetic is ready to go. However it does seem as though the SCEE London has gone the extra mile in ensuring that this is most all encompassing work-out game ever to hit the shelves.

The game's dedication to promoting physical fitness enlisted the aid of hundreds of Nike employees and an extensive visit to Nike's World HQ. The development of the Full Vision Lens (FVL), which will be packaged with the game, makes the whole human body into an on screen avatar lunging around the living room in response to invisible forces. Acknowledging that such wild movements could also lead to serious personal injury, Nike Motionworks has overseen the development of every aspect of the game to ensure that each exercise promoted by the game is safe and encourages a wide range of movement to give a full body work out. The game's virtual trainers are there to both guide you through each action and to organise your warm up and stretches in over 3 hours of footage. Further more you can tailor your own workout to ensure that you get your favoured type of level in more or one appropriate to the muscle group you want to work on. 

The game will also push you to improve on certain movements by increasing difficult levels if you are getting really good at something and it can set up a long term program using the PS2's internal clock. The games themselves vary quite dramatically and will have you performing a range of athletic feats determined by four categories of training which are Cardio, Combat, Toning and Mind and Body, each of which has its own environment and accompanying music style. Tai Chi style stretches, dancing and frantically battering virtual enemies out of the sky as well as traditional sit ups, etc are all available in the 22 different work outs and SCEE London has also improved the camera technology so that it can now detect impact speed and has greater sensitivity. A new slimmer camera will also be launched in conjunction with Kinetic, which is specially designed to sit on a flatscreen telly.

The Eye Toy: Kinetic will be released on September 23^rd and us lucky Brits will be the first to get our mitts on it. I reckon that it might do Sony proud especially given the fitness video fad and the fact that even buying the camera on top of it still makes the game considerably cheaper than joining a gym or hiring a personal trainer. This and other exclusive EIEF news can be found on our fantastic sister blog Games Digest.