Taking advantage of camera phones to design mobile games

Camblaster, here is how the website describes it:

Shoot at flying targets through the camera! Move the phone away and discover swarms of new targets to shoot! Come back, and see the previous targets still flying in the same zone! CamBlaster!™ creates a new gaming experience because it uniquely integrates the reality seen through the camera into the classic fun of a great shooter game. Designed to be embedded into handsets or downloaded from premium content & application services, CamBlaster! is targeted at camera phone vendors and manufacturers, mobile carriers and content providers.

Why do I blog this? What I found interesting with this game is not the scenario but instead, the fact that it takes advantage of a feature of the phone to engage the user in a novel interaction. Game designers being to notice that the mobile game experience can be something else than just a gameboy-like scenario. The use of peculiar mobile phone features (voice, camera, geolocation...) is a way to move forward. Connected pasta: this post tackled this issue, with an emphasis of the technical feasability.

Update (via): Besides, a related project is eyemobile. This is the company that developed the technology underlying the Sony EyeToy (demo here):

The Cell Phone Becomes a Joystick: EyeMobile software uses the cell phone's camera to “lock" to images of physical objects in the environment (for example a dark or a light tile on the floor). As the phone is tilted, that objects position in the camera view moves. EyeMobile then deduces how much, how fast and which direction a user is tilting or otherwise moving the phone. Basically, it turns the phone into a joystick.