I guess it was 4 years ago, maybe 5. We were at the old house, not really much Halloween going on there, but we bought my oldest an Eye Toy for his Bday that year.

This is a camera doodad you hook up to a Playstation 2. It's got some minigames to play, and he enjoyed it thuroughly. I never payed it much mind.

My younger son just rediscovered it. I see there are several 'games' out for this now, so this is the original "eye toy play" disk. (there are now 3)

Going down to put them to bed, they were messing around with this thing.

Apparantly in addition to the minigames, there are little screen settings as well. It is this latter that has caught my attention.

Most are cutesy little stuff where you can push around bubbles or leaves, etc on the screen. There are a few, however, that just may have uses for Halloween.

First, the camera gives everything moving a very jerky animation. It is most reminiscent of things like 'The Grudge" or "The Ring". There may be an easier way to produce this, I'm unfamiliar with camera software, but I could imagine filming a "Samara" character climbing out of a well towards the TV. Placing a group in the same room with that well, and showing the film, at the end of which lights go out and a 'Samara' actress sneaks in. Lights go back on and the TV switches to a live feed with Samara standing right behind everyone.

Second, there is a setting that puts everything on about a 2 second delay. Kids are fascinated by this from what I've seen. I can imagine them playing with the TV, and having something step up behind them. They see it coming on the TV and turn around to find it already right on top of them. This setting features a rather creepy soundtrack with it, even.

Third was a 'materialize' setting. Again, don't know camera software and there may be an easier way, but... Anything moving gets super pixelated and 'materializes' from place to place. I could easily see using this to record videos for a crystal ball setup or something of that sort.

Anyway, anyone have any experience with this at all?

We have one, and I was actually thinking about this myself. My son has a TV that has a built in VCR and he is able to videotape record the stuff on the playstation onto a tape. I guess you could come up with some sort of pre-recorded scene that you could play on a loop?

Well, you could plug the output from the PS into anything to record. I think DVD/DVR would be the way to go, easy to get it to repeat from there.