DICE 2009: EyePet Eyes-on

February 19, 2009 - Today, Sony presented a panel discussion with Michael Denny, senior vice president of Worldwide Studios Europe and Mike Haigh, development director for Sony's London Studio, regarding Sony's European game development. At the end of the discussion, a video presentation was given for the upcoming project, EyePet.

The EyePet is a little virtual pet that most closely resembles a monkey, but isn't. It looks like you can customize his fur, put costumes on him and so forth. The demo showed a kid interacting with him in a handful of ways. The kid was sitting on his living room floor and the EyePet appeared to be on the floor in front of him.

In a few different scenes, the kid was using a couple different virtual toys to play with the EyePet. In one scene, he was flying a little plane that the EyePet was riding on, and in another he was driving what looked like a wooden car as the EyePet chased it around the room. There was also a scene with a bubble maker where the EyePet chased down and popped the bubbles.

What seems kind of cool is that at least some of these toys tie into challenges of some sort. Completing a challenge will unlock a new prize, like a new costume for your EyePet, such as the dinosaur one they showed off.

While the kid was using a DualShock 3 to drive the vehicles, you can also interact with the EyePet just by "touching" it. Obviously you can pet it, but it also seems like you can pick it up.

It'll be interesting to see if the direct interaction with the EyePet is intuitive. Since he's obviously not actually in the room, you'll essentially be waving your hand in the air to pet him on TV, so it's possible that it'll feel awkward and that you'll have to "feel around" to get your hand in the right place to pet him.

Anyway, it most certainly looks pretty cool and I'm sure kids will dig it. The audience reaction to the video seemed to be positive, so hopefully it actually delivers on its potential.