I thought it was pretty funny when a couple of engineers came onstage during Sony's press conference, sporting what looked like a TV remote with a blue ping-pong ball stuck on the end. I was embarrassed for the poor fellows before they even opened their mouths. Then one of them explained how the ping-pong ball had a tracking device inside and it could change colors. For instance, he suggested it might turn red when you throw a fireball in a fantasy game. He sort of swished his hand forward in a half-hearted Wiimote gesture. The ping-pong ball turned red. Dear lord, these poor guys. It was like the wind-up for a joke when you not only know the punchline, but you know it's not funny.

Of course, the joke was on me. I was about the see Sony pull off yet another upset at E3.

Read about the battle of the motion sensor game controls after the jump.

Each of the three console manufacturers showed off a new motion-sensor controller at E3. Microsoft's Project Natal, Nintendo's Wii Motion Plus, and Sony's unnamed ping-pong ball remote. The most underwhelming, but the most proven, is a dongle you stick on the bottom of your Wiimote and - voila! - you've got a Wiimote Motion Plus. There are at least three games in the pipeline to take advantage of its improved capabilities. But rather than anything substantially new, it seems mostly like a refinement of what the Wii's been doing all along.

For the real revolution in motion-sensor controllers, you have to turn to Sony and Microsoft, who are desperately trying not to be outpaced by the Nintendo's Wii and are willing to ape the Wiimote to prove it. The thinking seems to be that people (i.e. non-gamers who buy Wiis in droves) want a special controller. Hence Microsoft's elaborate smoke-and-mirrors act with Project Natal (video here), an Xbox attachment that senses your body movements, recognizes your face, and is apparently imbued with an almost magical voice recognition. Not to say there isn't anything substantive behind it. There very well may be. But given the presentation at E3, it all seems very hypothetical. Having Steven Spielberg introduce a promotional video makes clear the comparison to Tom Cruise's Minority Report interface-fu. Renowned demo showman Peter Molyneux narrated a really creepy video about a woman interacting with a virtual boy, but this was raised a huge red flag for those of us who've seen the contrast between Mr. Molyneux's showmanship and his games. This is the guy Microsoft puts up there to convince us that Project Natal is going to work?

The only live demos included some poor woman named Abby spazzing out during an awful game in which you hit virtual balls. She then served as the hindquarters of an elephant in what was obviously a well-practiced paint splashing demo highlighting the sloppiness of the motion sensors. This is all you've got Microsoft? Virtua-Pollack?

Project Natal is a neat idea, with the emphasis on "idea". As Spielberg said, "This is not reinventing the wheel. There is no wheel." How very zen. And also appropriate, but not in the way Microsoft intended.

Compare this to Sony's live demo of their unnamed tech (video here), which includes a camera and the ping-pong ball controller. During the demo, the camera superimposed the user's image on the screen, putting him into virtual places. It then drew objects in place of the controller. A whip, a morning star, a gun, a flashlight, each able to interact with the environment. During the live demo, the engineers gradually won over the crowd by doing things like using a pair of controllers to mimic hands that can move blocks. They showed off a first-person shooter view. They wrangled a real time strategy game. They chucked throwing stars at monsters. They had the precision to tickle a skeleton's ribcage with a sword. And whereas Microsoft was sloshing buckets of paint on a canvas, Sony's engineer was able to cleanly and precisely write his name in thin air, managing better penmanship than I've ever been able to achieve with a DS and stylus.

Consider, too, a pair of bow and arrow demos. Nintendo had demonstrated archery during their Wii Sports Resort demo. You're supposed to strike an archer's pose, using the Wiimote Motion Plus with a nunchuk attachment. Although the guy doing the demo suggested you fire by pulling your arm back as if you were actually drawing back a bowstring, there is no positional sensor in the nunchuk attachment. Like so much of the Wii's gimmickry, it's canned interaction and button pressing. But when Sony demonstrated archery with a pair of ping-pong ball controllers, the act of drawing back the imaginary bowstring had a meaningful effect. The system could read the position of each controller and fire the bow based on how far back you held your arm.

Before the show, if you'd told me Sony's controller gimmick was going to trump Nintendo, much less Microsoft, I would have said you were crazy. But that's precisely what happened at E3. We're not likely to see any of this tech before next year, and who knows how the pricing and developer support will shake out. But at this point in time, Sony is the clear winner in the battelf of the next-gen motion-sensor controllers.