10 Ways The Sega Dreamcast Was Ahead Of Its Time
4. The Dreameye
After seeing a prototype PlayStation 2 at the 1999 Game Developers Conference, Richard Marks was struck with inspiration: a digital camera peripheral which could detect motion, allowing for highly interactive, motion-controlled games. What fun that would be, he mused (possibly: this is literary embellishment). Marks subsequently joined Sony to work on his pet project, the EyeToy. Little did he know, Sega had already beaten him to the punch.
Before the EyeToy was even a twinkle in Marks' eye, Sega's R&D had already conceptualised a virtually identical device, and in 1998 began to develop it proper. Originally devised as the Dreamcast's answer to the booming webcam industry, the 'Dreameye' began to acquire more lofty intentions than merely allowing teenagers to expose their particulars to one another (I presume they do that sort of thing).
Speaking at the camera's unveiling in Cannes, Sega of Japan's Takenori Fujishima alluded to the possibility of the Dreameye being fully embraced by Dreamcast games - "when the technology becomes more advanced." His thinking was that players would be able to use their pictures as skins, and furthermore play as themselves. Like the EyeToy, yeh?
As we know, technology did sufficiently advance to allow this. Unfortunately for Sega, their exit from the hardware market had long-since been written into video game folklore.