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If anyone was still unconvinced that motion control was the future of gaming, there can be no question now after it was the star of the show at all three press conferences at E3 2009. And while Nintendo brought the idea to the forefront first in most gamers’ minds, the fact is that Sony did it first on a much smaller scale with the original EyeToy. And while Nintendo tried to market their Wiimote add-on Motion Plus at E3 as the next step forward in waggle gaming, Microsoft and Sony smashed their hopes with ambitious plans of their own.

So now the question that will be debated long into the foreseeable future is which of the two technologies reigns supreme. We’ll try to answer that question as best it can be with what little we’ve seen of both so far.

Project Natal is said to be based off of 3DV Systems ZCam technology (awesome tech demos: 1, 2, 3), 4), but may also be related to Microsoft’s license agreement with GestureTek, Inc. It uses an RGB camera and an infrared 3D depth map camera for full body motion capture, along with some sophisticated software to put it all together. What that means is that it can see your full body ’s exact position in 3D space and therefore allows you to use your entire body to interact with the game, ‘no controller required’. But it’s yet unknown just how precise it is at reading small motions such as the small wrist position twists used to curve your ball in a bowling, tennis, or golf game. And would you really want to use your finger-gun for a first-person shooter?

Sony’s unnamed motion controller on the other hand, we’ll call it EyeToy2 for now, uses its camera to see the position of special wands in 3D space, and also uses gyros and/or accelerometers for precision. This means that every tiny little twist, twitch, and motion is seen with extremely accurate precision and speed…right down to the millimeter in fact. What’s more, it uses a technology similar to Augmented Reality to transform the look of the wand to anything you could possibly dream up. Examples shown included guns, swords, lightwhips, baseball bats, tennis rackets, and even hands. You could also use these virtual toys to interact with the environment, such as using the tennis racket to hit the ball.

But the debate doesn’t end in Sony’s favor just yet. That’s because Project Natal could conceivably also do everything that Sony’s device did simply by adding hardware wands (or Wiimotes) of it’s own and tweaking it’s software accordingly. And did we mention that Project Natal also has voice recognition? Now that both Sony and Microsoft have shown their cards, there is a good likeliness that the rest of the time up until launch will be used to steal the ideas from each other for their own systems. Sony could easily add voice recognition for example, and they could certainly add what’s needed to see full body motions as well. The bottom line is that in order to get the best of both worlds, Sony will need to add full 3D depth map tech and Voice Recognition, and Microsoft will need to add a handheld device with some buttons like Sony’s Wand. And Nintendo could certainly add a camera and voice recognition to their already good Wiimote to stay viable, though it won’t help their lack of hardware muscle.

With that in mind, let’s imagine what that perfect scenario could do. Imagine using a gun-style controller with triggers and buttons to play in an FPS style game. You might walk into a room and find you had been lured into a trap and are now surrounded from all sides. A voice yells out ‘drop your weapon and put your hands in the air!’. You literally have to put the controller on the floor and raise your hands or you will get shot down. Next you find yourself being interrogated and you have to answer some questions correctly to get out of the situation. That’s just one small example of how these technologies could come together for an insanely exciting experience, add stereoscopic glasses and you’re knocking on the door of virtual reality akin to a Holodeck.

Either way the winner of this battle will be us, the gamers. The future of gaming has just taken huge steps to the next level, and that future looks amazing indeed!