Call it the "Gesture" era, if you will. Veteran game marketer Bruce Everiss waxed about the impact of gesture controls in his blog, and he makes a good point: the way you'd interact with games was static for decades (variations of the joystick/joypad). It was only a couple of years ago that things started to open up.

Sony's Eye-Toy for the PS2 is remembered as a gimmick these days, but it sold like crazy for a season or two and remains most people's introduction to gesture-based controls. You simply stood in front of your TV and waved your arms around to make stuff happen. See an item on the screen? Reach up and touch it to interact with it. Want to shift your character's weight on a hoverboard? Lean back and forth. Intuitive and easy. "It is a pity that Sony did not realise what they had," Everiss explains, "otherwise the PlayStation Eye would have been built into the PS3."

On the other hand, Nintendo recognized gesture-based interfaces as a gold mine. Why? By changing the way you interact with games, you could open them up to a whole new audience. Shigeru Miyaomoto often talks about how intimidating modern game controllers are to non-gamers, which is why the Nintendo Wii opted for a controller that looks like a TV remote -- something most people are familiar with. It's got one big button under your thumb and you simply wave it around to play. It's much more toy-like. And it's already proving that it can get a lot of people playing games!


Nintendo continues to experiment with alternative control schemes. I wouldn't call it gesture-based, but at the Nintendo press conference at E3 2007 the company introduced a controller that sat on the floor and tracked the player's shifting weight. I tried it out afterwards: You could flex your knees to make your character jump, or tilt your body to tilt a platform on the screen. It's at the heart of the upcoming game Wii Fit (See videos).

Thanks to the runaway success of the Wii (Nintendo's Stock is at an all-time high), we're going to see a LOT more experimentation with gesture-based controllers in the years to come. Today Next-Generation writes about In2Games, a company working on nifty gesture-based controllers for next-gen consoles. And it's worth Reading this article I wrote in 2005 about gesture-based controllers in development, based on a presentation at the DICE summit. The stuff you see in the movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise manipulates computer displays floating in air before jumping on Oprah's couch, is totally within our grasp. (No pun intended).

It's going to be a great decade.

      -Fargo