Recently demoed at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a control device that could rival the Wiimote for gestural input: Sixense's TrueMotion, which uses a wireless handset coupled with a (presumably USB) base station to determine motion and position information. The big leap here is the latter: the Wiimote's accelerometer can only give relative motion data, and absolute 3D positioning is nigh on impossible to derive from this without some inaccuracy and drift. Some positional info could be gleaned using the Wiimote's IR LEDs, but this was still less than ideal and had the inherent limitations of a line-of-sight system.

The TrueMotion device functions by locating the handset within a magnetic field, which appears to give snappy and precise location data. It reminds me of the Ascension Flock of Birds sensor, which I briefly played with a couple of years back, albeit without the clunky serial I/O and hefty pricetag: the TrueMotion is estimated at $100 for a base station and handset. There's an interesting interview with one of the Sixense chaps over at Engineering TV.

I'm looking forward to get more info on this as it sounds like a potentially paradigm-changing controller for audio and video. Transmission range? Multiple devices/base stations? Proprietary drivers? We shall see, as it is due to hit the market later this year.