Patent ID: 6890262

Claim:
In a video game apparatus including a display having a screen for displaying images, display control means for creating game images as seen from a simulated camera viewpoint and displaying said images on the screen of said display; and a game control part for conducting the game in response to reactions of a player responsive to the images displayed on said display; said video game apparatus comprising: image capture means which can be arranged in such an orientation that a field of view is a play area in front of the display screen, and said image capture means periodically capturing an image of the play area in a state arranged; a main memory having a first buffer storing the captured images by the image capture means and a second buffer storing a position of a reference region of the player; said image capture means including: an averaging processor generating an average image based on a plurality of the captured images stored in the first buffer except a last captured image; a first differentiator/binary converter generating a difference regarding color information between the last captured image and the averaged image; an area determinator checking whether an area of a region corresponding to said difference is below a threshold value or not; position detecting means for detecting from the captured images a position of a player's reference region in case said area is found to be greater than the threshold value and for storing the position of the detected reference region into the second buffer; movement detecting means for detecting two-dimensional movement of said position of the reference region detected by said position detecting means; and viewpoint changing means for moving the simulated camera viewpoint to a new viewpoint in accordance with a change direction and change amount of the position of the detected reference region and displaying on the screen a view from said new viewpoint.