The newly formed development studio today announced Silhouette, the world’s first gesture-based video game which treats players to a rhythm gaming experience without the need for any controller. In Silhouette, players’ body movements control the gameplay entirely.
Softkinetic Studios is composed of video game industry veterans with more than 40 years of combined experience with Infogrames, Darkworks, 10Tacle, Playlogic and Elsewhere Entertainment on titles such as Outcast, Outcast 2, Alone in the Dark® and I’m Alive.
"Softkinetic has established a leadership position in the 3D gesture recognition market, and our iisu™ software platform offers developers in this pioneering space a standard development platform that supports all 3D depth sensing cameras, in addition to adaptability for any hardware platform," said Eric Krzeslo, Softkinetic’s chief strategy officer. "Over the years we have developed unique know-how and expertise in building immersive gesture-based applications, and we have seen an increasing demand not just for our technology – but for applications and content as well. Softkinetic Studios is our answer to this demand."
Softkinetic Studios’ first project, Silhouette (working title), will premiere at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, in San Jose, Calif. from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, 2009. At the conference, attendees will have the first opportunity to control the game’s on-screen avatars purely through their own body movements in real time. Silhouette challenges players with a series of rapidly approaching walls, each containing a different person-shaped opening – to successfully pass through each musically driven challenge, players must pose and contort their bodies to guide their in-game avatars through. Thanks to the charming gameplay and intuitive 3D camera technology, the game is immediately fun and accessible for players of all ages and skill levels while offering added depth for experienced gamers of music and dance games. Silhouette is scheduled for release in the second half of 2010.
"Softkinetic Studios brings several decades of combined experience in video game design and development. The opportunity to form a studio focused exclusively on this revolutionary 3D camera technology is very exciting, and Silhouette is perfectly suited to leverage this new technology," said Cyrille Wagner, Softkinetic Studios’ technical director. "The momentum created by recent announcements such as Microsoft Natal, combined with Softkinetic’s leadership in 3D gesture recognition market paint a promising picture for our new studio."
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