Though it isn’t a game, Yoostar is definitely familiy entertainment. So it makes sense that Yoostar is showing off its forthcoming product for Mac OS X and Windows at this week’s E3 gaming convention. The $170 kit lets you inject yourself into scenes from your favorite Hollywood films, and it’s coming out this summer.
The kit includes a webcam, remote control, and portable “green screen.” The software also includes 14 clips — a total of 38 scenes — from movies you can put yourself into right away. The company also plans to expand the number of offerings in the coming years — it plans to make about 8,000 additional clips available over the next three years. Additional downloadable content will be priced from $1 – $4.
The scenes are from movies including The Godfather, Blues Brothers, and The Terminator, to name a few; all told, five major motion picture studios have licensed their content for use with Yoostar, along with the NBA and the Children’s Television Workshop (makers of Sesame Street).
The software shows a “dead man’s chalk line” on the screen to show you how to position yourself in front of the camera. The portable green screen, placed behind you, makes it easier for you to superimpose yourself into the scene without seeing artifacts like the room behind you, furniture or other people.
Getting Hollywood movie studios on board with Yoostar required some concessions — the content you’re producing is output in a proprietary format, so you won’t be able to put it into iMovie, for example, though Yoostar does include mechanisms to let you upload your movie clips to social networking sites. YouTube, however, is one notable exception. The content is filtered, so you won’t find any nudity.
Yoostar.com will also be home to user-uploaded clips; the company is positioning its own service as a social networking location where Yoostar users can share clips with each other, publish or make clips only available privately, or with friends only.