Tip Sheet.(Playstation 2 gets new accessory; new punk rock CD; healthy beer)

TECHNOLOGY

Playstation 2 Gets An Eyeful

Who says women don't play videogames? Last August, Meredith Viera wowed her fellow hosts and a studio audience with her demonstration of EyeToy ($50; www.us.playstation.com), a brand-new accessory for the PlayStation 2. While Sony Computer Entertainment America researcher Richard Marks explained EyeToy's motion-tracking technology to the crowd, Viera proceeded to take down an army of miniature martial artists in a game called Kung Foo, using only her bare hands. In other words, "Look, Ma, no controller." "Getting to go on 'The View' was great," says Marks, who led the four-year development of EyeToy. "She practiced on the easy level, but when she did it live, we put her on medium. It was a lot more frantic, but she handled it in stride, and really got into the game."

For a (mostly male) generation that grew up on Nintendo, then graduated to PlayStation, the PS2's black controller is practically an extension of the human body. For everyone else, just picking up the 15-button device can be intimidating. EyeToy promises to change all that. When you connect the EyeToy to your PS2 via a USB port, your image appears on screen. The camera lets PS2 track your movements, which means that you can now use your hands, knees, feet and other extremities to interact with games that take advantage of this new peripheral.

The camera ships with EyeToy: Play, a collection of minigames that showcases what EyeToy can do. In Soccer Craze, you use your head and knees to keep a virtual soccer ball up in the air. In Wishi Washi, you use your hands to wipe the muck from a series of dirty windows as quickly as possible. And in Boxing Chump, you slug it out with a robot. If it sounds silly, it is, and that's the point: it's meant to be a fun and competitive activity for groups of people, like Twister, as opposed to the solitary experience of many videogames. "It's like karaoke," says Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony. "Once you're up there doing it, you have a great time."

Since the 12 minigames in EyeToy: Play only scratch the surface, Sony gave NEWSWEEK a behind-the-scenes look at future possibilities. EyeToy can track your body movements without showing you on screen, so it could be used in a first-person shooter like Doom to let you look around corners or peek over obstacles by simply moving your head. EyeToy can also recognize special reflec-tive materials, mean-ing that it could be used to create everything from a Harry --Potter game that lets you use a wand to cast spells, to a real-life version of the hand- controlled screens in Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" (we saw the demo, and trust us, it's way cool). When it comes to Sony's EyeToy, see-ing is definitely believing.

--N'Gai Croal