The probably-imminent reveal of both the PS4 and Xbox 720 sometime before or during E3 is doing little to slow the persistent churnings of the rumor mill. If next-gen speculation suits your fancy as well as it suits ours, you'll do well to read on.
PS4, Xbox 720 Rumors: Week of 4/14/13
Some exciting PS4 and Xbox 720 news broke over the weekend: The Workshop — the studio responsible for Sorcery — is at work on a follow-up to its motion control-based PS3 title that will allegedly be a first-person shooter. And in Xbox 720 news, Microsoft's Durango console is rumored to use a wearable controller.
PS4 Rumors: Sorcery follow-up
Video game studio The Workshop created the exclusive PS3 title Sorcery, which made use of the Playstation Move controller and Eye camera. Now, the developer has posted a message to its official website, simply stating: "We're proud to announce that The Workshop is developing for PS4."
While there's been no official confirmation as to the nature of the upcoming Workshop title, a few clues can be inferred from the studio's help-wanted ads. Specifically, The Workshop is actively hiring programmers and Web developers and one of their new hires is art director Jackson Robinson, whose experience mainly centers around first-person shooters. The Workshop was also able to poach Free Realms' creative director Laralyn McWilliams, who has already said in a press release that her "experience in the online space will definitely be put to very good use." Are we going to see a motion-controlled MMO on the PS4?
Xbox 720 Rumors: Wearable controller
This rumor is based on a recently filed Microsoft patent, so take it with a grain of salt. Allegedly, the Redmond-based developer is working on a wearable controller armband with "sensor nodes for implementing the wearable electromyography-based controller."
Right.
Maybe you can make more sense of the patent schematic than we were, but here's a layman's description from the guys at Patent Bolt:
"In general, the Wearable Electromyography-Based Controller includes one or more integrated Electromyography (EMG) sensor nodes. The EMG sensor nodes within the Wearable Electromyography-Based Controller measure muscle electrical activity for use in muscle-computer interaction applications. However, unlike conventional Electromyography (EMG) measurement systems, the Wearable Electromyography-Based Controller described herein requires only general positional placement on the user's body. In fact, this general placement of the Wearable Electromyography-Based Controller is enabled by including more EMG sensors than are expected to be necessary to measure muscle electrical activity. An automated positional localization process is then used to automatically identify and select a subset of some or all of the sensor nodes that are in an appropriate position to collect muscle electrical signals corresponding to particular user gestures or movements."
So that means it's like a Power Glove, right?
