Homebrew Eyetoy Games ith Flash and the Status of the Peripheral
This is not exactly news since Flash8 was published last summer but recently the authoring tool is being increasingly used as a means for creating homebrew Eyetoy-style games and applications via the built-in .camera and .microphone classes and the BitmapData class. This new functionality makes it exceedingly easy to use difference blending (i.e. checking for color differences between two keyframes) to detect motion and implement gesture-control for webbased applications.
Furthermore, the recent 3rd generation drivers for the Sony Eyetoy allow users to plug even the new silver edition Eyetoys into their Windows XP/ 2003 Server PC and create games for it which come as close to commercial Eyetoy games as Indie games ever came to commercial-quality products. I'm playing around with a few demos at the moment and will post a link to the results when I have something.
Making a 'peripheral' device easily programmable by amateurs, however, IMO alters the 'status' of the hardware and its usage. While most PS2 and other console peripherals like Lightguns, the Gametrak or other, more bizarre controllers operated as a 'black box' which is plugged into the console and (hopefully) does what it's supposed to do, the programmable Eyetoy as an interface will probably change the way players interpret it as their interface to the game.
Maybe it will also boost the Eyetoy sales in the US which, as far as I'm informed, are less than satisfying at present; i.e., before the new eyetoy is released...