The year is now 2010 and with it came an intriguing new patent from the genius brethren at Microsoft.

No, we aren’t talking about the E3-announced Project Natal; a technology that requires a gyroscopic motion control detector, this my friends, if far more alluring.

How does it work? Basically, it’s a muscle-controlled mechanic which, in not so many words, translates your muscle gestures, to real-world applications.

The video displays it all in great detail, including a segment showing the researcher playing Guitar Hero with simply his hands, and a bunch of wires connected to them.

Obviously we’re years away from practical application, but, the technology is there, and it’s rapidly evolving and becoming more and more real for gaming and all other walks of life.

Source: Destructoid

When Nintendo releases its next console it’ll almost assuredly have motion-control support.

Speaking with Popular Mechanics, Shigeru Miyamoto, the creative force behind many Nintendo games, said motion control will likely return in the Wii 2, and teased a lower price-point and physical size of the controllers.

“With both the Wii remote itself and Wii Motion Plus, what we’ve been able to do is introduce an interface that is both I think appealing and at the right price for a broad audience,” said Miyamoto. “And while we don’t have any concrete plans for what we’ll be doing with hardware in the future, what I can say is that, my guess is that because we found this interface to be so interesting, I think it would be likely that we would try to make that same functionality perhaps more compact and perhaps even more cost-efficient.”

Miyamoto also spoke about the lack of HD graphics on the current Wii system and if the next console would feature greater graphical fidelity.

“What I don’t think is particularly true is that the graphics make the game,” he said. “We’re still going to focus on the gameplay. We’ll take advantage of the technology as it comes out, but right now, this is what we offer.”

Nintendo started the motion-control gaming revolution with the Wii, so it would make sense that they’d continue that effort in the next version, but, and it’s a huge but, this is Nintendo we’re talking about, so your guess, or the guess of my ten-year-old sister, is just as valid.

What do you want in a “Wii 2″?

Source: IGN

Sony held their lengthy E3 media briefing this morning in sunny Los Angeles and the company clearly had games on the brain.‚  They announced, showed off, and even demonstrated a myriad of hot titles coming to PS3 and PSP in the future but at a point in the middle interestingly departed from their game onslaught to debut a brand new precision-based motion-control technology bearing no name.

Due out early next year, this new 1:1 motion tracking technology makes use of two wands with colored balls of light at their ends tracked by a camera located near the PS3 itself.

Two engineers on the project took the stage, revealed that the new tech has been in the works for a “few years now” and will add to the PS3 interactive capabilities, and promised that what they were showing was merely a prototype.

That said, the two showed the first capabilities of the control mechanism, and while the technology is obviously not revolutionary (see Wii), it was alluring nonetheless.

We saw motion-tracking at a very precise level as the demonstrator showed how, by using the two wands, any number of gaming possibilities can be achieved including the use of the dynamic wands as literal extensions of one’s hands to build, draw, and create any number of things in the virtual test space.

More interestingly, when an object was picked up in the virtual space it could be transfigured into any number of objects ranging from a peaceful paint brush to a hell raising automatic weapon.

We don’t know where this technology will lead in the immediate future, only that it will become available sometime next year.