At the Develop conference in Brighton, Sony revealed that its PS3 motion controller will support facial and gesture recognition technology.

"… On the face of it, it looks like we’re just introducing a new controller, but when you look at the PS Eye, the mic, the visual libraries and everything combined, there are a lot of exciting things you can do with it," Paul Holman, SCEE’s vice president of developer relations, told Edge.

While the motion controller’s not due to launch until spring 2010 – and Sony says it’s on track to hit that target – the tech’s already in developers’ hands.

"[Developers] are experimenting with it and looking to see what they can add to their games," Holman added. "Anything’s possible really. We’ve tried to make that ‘anything is possible’ as easy as possible. You’ve got the motion control and you’ve also got the PlayStation Eye, and we have a lot of libraries in this space already to do with facial recognition, spatial recognition, gesture recognition and all of these little elements. All we can provide are these Lego blocks. At the end of the day game designers and developers have to think about how they put them together and how they make something that’s unique and compelling."

And developers are highly impressed with the controller too, according Kish Hirani, SCEE’s head of developer services.

"Our primary focus is developers and what they really want for it," he said. "They have the added advantage that they’re generally multiplatform developers… Good multiplatform developers straight away compare this with other platforms more than we do and they say, ‘Wow, this is bloody precise when it maps you when you’re moving in front of it’. The classic example I give to people is that the most precise thing you can do is write your name using a [piece of] chalk on a blackboard. Try doing that with a mouse and it’s bloody difficult."

News From: computerandvideogames.com