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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: NemoTheCaptain

The dawn of a new era.

When it comes to somatosensory games, most players are likely to think of Nintendo Wii consoles, which sell hundreds of millions of dollars. Before Wii became popular all over the world, the most successful somatosensory gaming device was PS2's camera EyeToy. Looking back in history, the EyeToy is also the first somatosensory game device with sales exceeding 10 million. Twenty years ago, on July 4, Sony lit up the dawn of somatosensory games with EyeToy, but gave Nintendo the midday of the red sun. This history is thought-provoking.

Young talent Richard Marks (Richard Marks) is not well known in the gaming world, but the talented doctor led the development of a variety of mainframe peripherals such as EyeToy, PS Move and PSVR, which can be described as the patriarch of Sony. Max was born in Michigan in 1969. Max has been a mathematical genius since childhood. In high school, the school installed the first computer. When the teacher did not know how to operate the computer, Max had taught himself programming knowledge.

After graduating from high school, Max was admitted to the Department of computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the summer vacation of his freshman year, Max came to an aerospace company for an internship. This experience let him know that computer scientists are only in an auxiliary position in the field of aerospace engineering, and the leader is engineers, so Max turned to aerospace electronics.

Richard Max is an expert in camera technology. After graduating from college, Max entered the Institute of Aerospace Robotics at Stanford University in California to pursue further studies. At first, Max studied the robotic arm of the space shuttle and the remote control of the space vehicle at Stanford. He thought these topics were interesting, but the aerospace industry was very expensive, the number of rocket launches was limited, and there were not many job opportunities. Max later worked as an intern at the Monterey Bay Aquarium during the summer vacation, where he helped design an underwater robot that could track schools of fish and map the ocean floor. The robot is far less technical than a space vehicle, but it gives Max a real sense of achievement.

Max, 26, earned his doctorate on "automatic control of underwater vehicles through visual sensors". Max believes that the key to improving robot control is to optimize the data algorithm of the camera and let the program automatically adjust the robot according to the image, which is more efficient and cheaper than simply improving the control system. According to the scheme of this paper, Max installed a pair of cameras for the robot of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The robot can analyze the underwater topography and current and automatically track the movement of fish by synthesizing 3D images through two cameras. It is far more efficient than human remote control operation. The system developed by Max is still widely used by underwater vehicles today.

After the underwater vehicle developed by Max received his doctorate, Max joined a start-up that studies cameras and developed software that allows cameras to track people's movements automatically for videoconferencing. After a year and a half, the startup was acquired by a Silicon Valley company, and Max became a Silicon Valley consultant.

When the parent company on the other side of Silicon Valley encounters a problem they can't solve, they ask Max, that's all, and the rest of the process has nothing to do with Max. It was a job with more money and less work, but Max was bored. He feels that if he simply wants to make money, he can go to Wall Street for gold, and he wants to continue to develop products in order to gain a sense of achievement.

Max's parents opened a small game store in the early 1980s. Max used to run errands when he was a teenager, although the shop closed in the "Atari shock" tide. Max still has a lot of good memories in the gaming world, and he hopes to develop hardware for the gaming industry.

The turnaround came in March 1999, when Sony publicly unveiled PS2 at the Game developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose, California. Richard Max came up with the idea of developing camera somatosensory games for PS2, and he joined Sony's research institute in Foster, California. The idea of somatosensory games was selected by Phil Harrison, vice president of technical research and development at Sony Electronic Entertainment (SCE).

Phil Harrison, who has both technical and marketing capabilities, believes that somatosensory games shoulder the important task of expanding the number of players. The complexity of the traditional handle is approaching its limit. The PS2 handle has 16 buttons, and casual players hold such a complex handle in their hands that they just throw it away like an unbolted grenade. The picture of the game has improved rapidly over the decades, but there has been no essential change in the handle. Developers have spent a lot of money on the screen and music of the game, but sales have been limited by the handle. In Harrison's view, only junior high school students can understand such a complex handle. Younger players can't understand it, and older players don't have time. The development cost of the game is getting higher and higher, but the handle limits the room for the improvement of game sales, this state is not reasonable, somatosensory games can break this situation.

Richard Max became a Sony employee for 19 years. Max said with a laugh that he never thought he would work at Sony for so long and chose Sony mainly because of its abundant research and development funds and sound marketing channels. Max disagrees with the suggestion that he should set up a start-up to study somatosensory technology and own patents to make more money. he knows that a product needs capital and market support for success, and startups have little chance of winning. As for why he had been working for 19 years, he had the idea of leaving Sony several times, but every few years Sony launched a new mainframe to provide opportunities for new peripherals, which made him interesting and fulfilling.

Various third-party companies launched several failed somatosensory peripherals for FC and MD hosts in the 1990s, all of which were lost in history. Somatosensory technology didn't mature until the late 1990s, and Nakayuji's team designed a handle that combines remote control and light gun functions for the DC mainframe, which is similar to the later Wii Zapper. The handle was rejected by Sega, but DC has since introduced a variety of somatosensory peripherals, such as the 1999 Sega Bass Fishing fishing rod and the 2000 Samba de Amigo sand hammer. DC somatosensory peripherals are not as accurate as the later Wii, and only tens of thousands of copies have been sold, but they have achieved technical success.

Nintendo veteran Nakagawa, whose DC handle was designed by Nakayuji's team to participate in the development of multiple hosts such as FC, also founded the "New Generation" company in 1995. Nakagawa said that Nintendo was addicted to advanced technology in the 1990s, but ignored the attribute of games as family entertainment. He devoted five years to developing highly integrated all-in-one chips, contacted toy companies such as Bandai and Konami, and launched a variety of somatosensory devices from 2000 to 2002. These products are small, plug-and-play, and come with a bat or racket to detect somatosensory changes through infrared technology. Despite the simple picture of the all-in-one machine and intuitive physical fun, Nakagawa's products have accumulated more than 100,000 sales in three years.

These early products in the form of an all-in-one somatosensory baseball game may give today's players a sense of the past, and Nintendo's Wii console is the first somatosensory device that most people come into contact with. Wii's somatosensory technology comes from pilot and engineer Tom Quinn, who successfully registered the patent in the United States in 1999 and tried to sell the patent to game companies in 2001, but hit a brick wall twice.

Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft, met with Tom Quinn. Ballmer thought somatosensory technology was promising and recommended Quinn to the Xbox hosting team for details. However, the Xbox team has a very arrogant attitude towards Quinn, saying that Microsoft can develop a better somatosensory solution without the need for Quinn patents. Then Quinn tried to sell the patent to Sony, and the answer from the "father of PS" was more clear: "the cost of this technology cannot be reduced to 50 yen, and Sony will not consider it."

Tom Quinn was not optimistic about the future of Nintendo at the time, but had no choice but to choose Nintendo after hitting a brick wall twice. Tom Quinn visited Nintendo at an eventful time in early September 2001, when the NGC mainframe had just made its Japanese debut. Yamauchi, the old president at that time, was ready to step back behind the scenes, and Nintendo's big event was discussed by six senior members of the board of directors. After a heated discussion, ASADA, then vice president of Nintendo, decided to buy the somatosensory patent. This technology only played a reserve role in 2001, and it was not until 2004 that the new president Satoshi Iwata decided that the follow-up mainframe of the NGC would abandon the high-definition screen and choose the somatosensory route, while the first release of the Wii would not be until 2006.

To get to the point, Richard Max developed a camera for PS2 that was originally called iToy (interactive Toy, interactive toy), and Phil Harrison later renamed it EyeToy (meaning "visual toy"), a concise name approved by the marketing department.

Max's initial test program for EyeToy was based on color detection. He used a tennis ball as a probe mark to make a virtual 3D object stand on the tennis ball, which would move inertia as the tennis ball moved. Max then replaced the tennis ball with a pink ball used by Sony's Aibo robot dog. Max inserted the pink ball into the tip of the pencil and waved the pencil in front of the camera, and the pencil on the screen became a magic wand.

EyeToy's early tennis test

In the fall of 2000, Phil Harrison asked Richard Max to fly to London, England to give a speech to show off the magic wand program in front of all the developers at Sony's London studio. A group of interested developers volunteered to make games for EyeToy, and then the London studio discussed the details.

At that time, EyeToy's image recognition algorithm was very rough, and the magic wand had obvious operation delays on the screen and could not recognize subtle movements. From a market point of view, EyeToy could protect sales if it launched a Harry Potter game, but at that time the game adaptation of Harry Potter was vested in EA, and Sony Studios in London did not want to negotiate with EA. In order to speed up the development, the London studio advised Max to temporarily abandon the magic wand game of color recognition, which would be much less difficult if the motion detection algorithm was used to scan the full body outline of the player in front of the screen. With this in mind, the London studio produced the first game "EyeToy: Play" for EyeToy, a Mini Game collection that showcases the play and potential of EyeToy.

Many people told Max that they were not optimistic about the future of the EyeToy, which had never been sold on the mainframe before, and that subsequent game support would be out of the question if the initial sales failed. In order to ensure the success of the EyeToy launch, Max put a lot of thought into the cost, and the bundled package of the EyeToy camera and the "EyeToy: Play" CD sold for only $49. Max has experimented with other somatosensory schemes, either the software algorithm still needs to be polished, or the hardware cost is high, "EyeToy: Play" is already the best solution at that time.

Strictly speaking, Max is not a traditional game developer, he is mainly responsible for the development of software and hardware tools, providing solutions for others, the London studio is responsible for actual game development, and Max provides technical support. Although Musk also traveled to London for three months at a critical moment in the summer of 2001, he spent most of his time solving problems remotely online in Foster, California.

EyeToy can read the player's full-body movement and apply it to a 3D model, but the London studio believes that it will be more powerful for players to see their own image on TV, so the protagonist of "EyeToy: Play" is the player himself, not a virtual 3D model. At that time, the software recognition algorithm was difficult to eliminate the background noise, and it was only suitable for detecting the movement of opening and closing, which consumed the players' physical strength quickly, and was suitable for the short Mini Game, so "EyeToy: Play" became the Mini Game collection.

The player appears directly in the screen. The London studio initially developed 30 Mini Game, and 12 of them were selected after testing. SCEA in the United States has perfect testing teams in Foster, California and Santa Monica, while SCEE in Europe lacks such teams, so they can only outsource testing. However, there were no perfect third-party game testing institutions in Europe at that time, only office software and web testing companies, which could only report how much Bug the software had, but not the playability of the game. The London studio can only find one web testing company to follow the process and recruit a large number of casual players to participate in the test.

Because casual players don't know anything about the game menu, most people get stuck in creating an archive menu in the first round of testing, and developers can only simplify the menu steps. After that, the test encountered the problem that some of the special effects were not completed, because "EyeToy: Play" is a rare innovation, and many of the games are not intuitive enough before the special effects are completed. Phil Harrison said: "Sony's marketing department can't understand the book until the picture is completely finished. When the game is 50% complete, it looks like only 1%. When the game is 80% complete, it looks like only 2%, and the rest depends on your own imagination."

Harrison also has a set of criteria for choosing Mini Game, and if a game has a perfect experience on the handle, you don't need to turn it into a body feel. On the other hand, glass cleaning is meaningless on the handle, but it is fun to change to somatosensory.

Glass-cleaning Mini Game A typical PS2 game costs between $3 million and $5 million to develop, while EyeToy: Play costs even more, though Harrison thinks it's worth the money. On the one hand, SCEE has set up its own testing team for this work; on the other hand, a lot of development money has been spent on improving EyeToy recognition algorithms; these investments will bring long-term returns to SCEE in the future.

Developers are not sure how many sets "EyeToy: Play" can be sold in preparation for the debut, and the internal prediction of the London studio can be described as polarized: "either less than 100000 or more than one million." This new concept game may exit gloomily, may emerge as a new force and sell successfully, and no one knows which one it is.

At that time, the largest game show in Europe was the European computer Business Show (ECTS) in London. With a try, SCEE took "EyeToy: Play" to ECTS in August 2002, and the results were rave. In past exhibitions, it was often the children who were in high spirits in front of the test machine and their parents sitting next to them chatting. This time, the child's parents and even grandparents joined the game. One of the children even had a good time with his grandmother in a wheelchair, which made the London studio unforgettable, so far they believe that "EyeToy: Play" will sell more than a million people.

The influence of ECTS is far less than that of E3. The exhibition of "EyeToy: Play" in E3 in May 2003 attracted more attention, and Shigeru Miyamoto, the "father of Mario" of re-elected paradise, tried it on E3. The European version of EyeToy: Play will be released on July 4, 2003, the American version on November 4 of the same year, and the Japanese version on February 11, 2004. Sales of the European version exceeded the 2 million mark in just four months. Cameras were not common peripherals for PC at the time, and Logitech, which makes cameras, made a fortune with EyeToy when it set a new revenue record in the fall of 2003.

Richard Max, the EyeToy camera of Logitech, said that at that time, ordinary PC cameras focused on improving definition, and the refresh rate was often only 10 frames. The resolution of EyeToy is 640 × 480, which is not high, but it provides a refresh rate of 60 frames, so it is naturally designed to reduce the delay of game operation. If the resolution of the EyeToy is further reduced to 320 × 240, the refresh rate can even be increased to 120 frames.

"EyeToy: dance", which went on sale in Europe on November 14, 2003, is the second dedicated EyeToy game, which is far less sensitive to light detection than "EyeToy: Play". In any case, EyeToy sold 2 million of these two games alone in Europe in 2003.

EyeToy sold 400000 in the United States in 2003 and 160000 in Japan in 2004, a far cry from Europe. On the one hand, the launch time of the American and Japanese versions of EyeToy is adjacent to a number of masterpieces, affecting sales. On the other hand, Sony's marketing departments in the United States and Japan have never worked hard to promote the EyeToy.

SCEA in the United States is keen to promote all kinds of core masterpieces and lacks interest in casual games. Japanese SCEJ unexpectedly said that "Japanese players do not like this kind of casual game." Ironically, the all-in-one game "Warriors against Dragons: sword God" developed by New Generation reached 500000 cumulative sales in Japan in 2004. Somatosensory games are very promising in Japan, and the arrogance of SCEJ's marketing department is unreasonable.

The all-in-one "Warriors against Dragons: sword God" was a mixed blessing for Phil Harrison in 2004, and although sales of the EyeToy in the United States and Japan were destroyed by careless marketing departments, sales of the camera in Europe continued to rise steadily, with third-party companies providing more support for EyeToy. The support for EyeToy in most third-party games is limited to shooting top stickers, and only a few third-party companies have shown their sincerity. Although "Mini Game superstar" is a Sega collection, it combines the play and body feel of all kinds of Sega classic games, so that veteran players can also enjoy it. Harmonix, famous for its music games, is determined to forge ahead, developing a sci-fi game "EyeToy: anti-gravity skateboarding", which has won praise.

With the support of Phil Harrison and the tide of EyeToy, SCEE continues to tap the potential of peripheral casual games. The microphone game "singer" in 2004 and the variety transponder game "Buzz" in 2005 were both successful, and their sequels even extended to the middle of the PS3 era many years later.

Full of speed sense of "EyeToy: anti-gravity skateboard"

In the multi-party melee of the "Buzz" bundled with the transponder, Chunke's "New Generation" company launched the XaviX of replaceable games in 2004. This is a game console positioned as a fitness type, with a body price of $79 and a game price of $59, many of which require specific peripheral controllers. Lost the brand effect of the big factory, this product has few responders. After that, the fitness equipment launched by the new generation was also unsuccessful. after years of support, the new generation finally declared bankruptcy in 2022.

Nintendo's new host Wii, which launched in 2006, operated with an accelerometer, which has greatly reduced the cost of the accelerometer, but Richard Marks believes that a single accelerometer cannot guarantee somatosensory accuracy and does not follow this plan.

Max launched PS Eye, EyeToy's successor, for PS3 in 2007. In terms of resolution and refresh rate, PS Eye has not improved, and Max focuses on other improvements. PS Eye is more sensitive to light and can work properly by relying solely on the light source of the TV when the lights are off. In addition, PS Eye's microphone matrix allows players to have a clear voice chat without headphones. However, the failure of SCEJ's PS Eye card game "Eye of judgment" caused the camera to fall into a temporary silence.

PS3 camera PS Eye at this time, Sony PS3 mainframe is in an uphill battle because of its high price and cost. Phil Harrison believes that Wii is just an enhanced version of NGC with its own body feeling, so Sony only needs to bundle the EyeToy for the PS2 to greatly ease the Wii offensive. Executives in Sony, the United States and Japan both wanted to popularize PS3 at all costs as soon as possible, vetoing Harrison's proposal, and Harrison could only let SCEE develop a few more PS2 games.

In 2008, the London studio released the last two new films for EyeToy, "EyeToy Play: heroes" and "EyeToy Play: cheerleading", the former with a plastic sword and the latter with two bouquets. Richard Max perfected EyeToy's color recognition algorithm as early as the end of 2003. through these simple plastic props, EyeToy can achieve somatosensory play similar to Wii.

Nintendo, a simple and effective plastic prop, installed a gyroscope on the Wii with the patch Wii Motion Plus in 2009, improving the accuracy of the operation. Sony's PS Move, launched in 2010, combines gyroscopes, accelerometers and magnetometers to achieve the highest accuracy and lowest delay. Players need PS Camera to capture PS Move data, and the set of two devices and complimentary games costs $99.

Many players suspect that Max imitated Wii's ideas, but Max said that PS Move was first developed for PS2 in 2003, when the cost of various parts was high, and the price of the set would be as high as $149. as a casual game peripherals, such a price had no future, so Sony hid the PS Move for seven years.

PS Move Max, who works with PS Eye, believes that Wii is a very successful host, and although Wii's somatosensory solution is not technologically advanced, Nintendo has adapted to local conditions and developed excellent somatosensory games with limited technology. As for Microsoft's Kinect camera, which was launched in 2010, Max respects the attempts of all his peers in principle, but he doesn't think Kinect is going in the right direction. Max tried an infrared camera similar to Kinect years ago, but abandoned it because it was difficult to strike a balance between cost, accuracy and delay. The resolution of Kinect is 640 × 480, and the refresh rate is only 30 frames, resulting in significant operation delay.

Sales of PS Move exceeded 1500 million in 2012, while Kinect exceeded 20 million in 2012. PS Move sales fell short of Sony's expectations, while Kinect met Microsoft's initial sales target. However, the theory of sales only is one-sided. Sony did not force first-party studios to support PS Move, but Microsoft closed a number of first-party studios that were reluctant to develop Kinect games, a decision that weakened Microsoft's development power. From this point of view, Kinect is the product that really failed.

In 2013, the new camera PS Camera went on sale with PS4, and this time Max used the stereoscopic imaging technology he studied when he was a PhD student, synthesizing depth data through two 1280 × 800 cameras. PSVR in 2016 cooperated with PS Camera and PS Move to form a complete set of solutions. As early as the era of 3D glasses in PS3, Max thought that the combination of somatosensory and stereoscopic picture was a new direction, and the cooperation of PSVR and PS Move was a natural evolution in this direction.

After 19 years of working for Sony, Richard Marks moved to Google in 2018 after PSVR's peripherals portfolio, whose development has not yet been made public. The 2023 PSVR2, as a virtual helmet for PS5, is no longer compatible with peripherals previously developed by Max.

Phil Harrison left Sony in 2008 and has failed to make new achievements in the 15 years since he moved to Infogames, Gaikai, Microsoft and Google. Harrison disappeared from the public eye after Google shut down its Stadia cloud gaming business in 2023.

Still, in retrospect, EyeToy's achievement of being ahead of the times is still a glorious moment for Max and Harrison. With cumulative sales of 12 million, the EyeToy is the first somatosensory game device with sales of more than 10 million. As the dawn of a new era, EyeToy will be remembered by history.

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