Motion control: Is this the future?

Console manufacturers are falling over themselves to remove the traditional interface between you and your games. None more so than Microsoft which, with ‘Project Natal’, will take the joypad – or any other kind of device – out your hands altogether. Small wonder that they’re claiming it will reinvent the games industry as we know and love it...

"If we'd just come out with something that looks and feels like the Nintendo Wiimote, I think you could have fairly criticised us and said it was derivative. That's not the path we wanted to go down," Microsoft’s Shane Kim tells GamesIndustry.biz.

"We could have done that, but we wanted to reinvent the industry and revolutionise home entertainment. That's what we will achieve with Project Natal."

Of course, the bigwig’s big words are easily uttered while Project Natal is still at the concept stage – it isn’t even due to launch until the latter half of 2010, or when, as Kim reveals “We feel like we have the entire program ready to go.” In short, don’t expect it any time soon.

Meanwhile the Nintendo and Sony offerings are rather more immediately tangible. Nintendo’s plug-in MotionPlus accessory arrives this month and enhances the sensitivity of the Wii Remote. In a similar vein Sony’s Motion Controller works with the PlayStation Eye camera to detect the speed and direction of motions in all three dimensions with unheralded levels of accuracy. That’s currently scheduled to launch early next year.

So, one way or the other, it looks like we’ll all be waving our arms or hand-held devices around to control our games. But Electronic Arts boss, John Riccitiello, has already spotted a fly in the ointment:

“I'm not sure that anybody wants to play Splinter Cell and actually duck-and-cover as much as is involved in Splinter Cell, because it'd be like doing 700 squats.”

That may well be so, although it’s possible that Riccitiello is also failing to see the bigger picture. But once these technologies are out there, and game developers have fully grasped the possibilities, are you really going to want to go back to the old-fashioned controllers? Or will joypads always have a place in your gaming?