Motion controls? Apparently the future of videogame controls lies not in flailing arms, but in emotional expression. Siliconera reports (via Joystiq) that Sony has filed a patent for a new technology that uses a camera and microphone to detect a player's emotions, including laughter, sadness, anger, joy, and even boredom.
As you can see in the diagram above (which we're pretty sure comes directly from a scene in Idiocracy), this new technology will read metadata derived from a camera and microphone (the PlayStation Eye, we presume) to know your emotional response to what you're seeing, such as potentially laughing at a humorous portion of a game. We can only assume this means the technology will also be able to read the terror you immediately feel when you realize your PlayStation 3 was able to know you were laughing.
According to the patent filing, this technology identifies emotions by reading facial expressions, as well as group behavior such as two players high-fiving each other. Boredom, for instance, could be detecting depending on whether someone is "looking away from the presentation, yawning, or talking over the presentation."
Exactly what applications Sony has planned for use with this technology in videogames isn't included in the patent (specific intents usually aren't included in patent filings), so it's hard to say how serious Sony is about someday using this tech, or how they would even plan to use it in the first place.
