There’s this crazy little game coming out for the PS3 called Eye of Judgement. The base game is actually a “fighting card game”, in a similar vein to Magic the Gathering. You play with actual cards. The twist with EoJ is that it has been designed in tandem with the new PlayStation Eye camera to make it a sort of augmented-reality card game. When the Eye is pointed at the play area, you can see the video image on screen with monsters superimposed over the cards and fighting in an animated way. It’s kind of a cool tech demo, as the monsters track with the motion of cards.

But – none of this matters, because you get the camera basically for free with the game. And the camera is very interesting as a piece of hardware: NTSC rez @ 60 FPS, 320×240 rez @ 120 FPS (!), extreme low-light sensitivity, dual fields of view, and a sophisticated 4-channel noise-cancelling microphone. Buy it for the Eye, stay for the Judgement if you like.

No word on pre-orders in Canada yet, but with a release date of October 23rd, it’s not far away at any rate. Of course this will be compatible with a few forthcoming video-based games, such as Operation Creature Feature (which has to be seen to be believed – it’s like Lemmings, with your bare hands), The Trials of Topoq, and the “I just fucking killed you, nyah” feature in Burnout Paradise. Of course there are also the usual video chat and capture uses as well. How else are you going to use your balls as a texture in LittleBigPlanet, hmm? See, it’s important.

It’s worth noting that you can use practiaclly any USB-Video class camera with the PS3 right now, including an old PS2 EyeToy. But this camera just looks really tempting, spec-wise.

Sony was a pioneer in video-based motion games when they released the original EyeToy for PS2. While not a huge hit over here in North America, it had substatially more impact in Europe, as the camera could be used for that goofy karaoke-on-steroids app SingStar. I’m very curious to see where they go with this. The Creature Feature trailer seems to demonstrate some fairly sophisticated image processing, as the game appears to be literally tracking your hands, sans weird gloves or any other typically computer-distinguishable visual cues. This is not an easy thing to do.

Anyways – an in-depth, superdork explanation of the EoJ card system and rules is available at Penny Arcade, who crave this title as if it were Jehovah himself, sliced into convenient paper tiles and neatly packaged inside a chocolate-dipped Holy Grail. Me, I think it looks sorta nifty, but I’ve never been one for cards. Perhaps the realtime compositing of otherworldly monsters keen to do my bidding will make the whole enterprise more engaging.