The latest mobile games use top-drawer console tricks to make handheld gaming a truly next-gen experience. The latest in a long line of ideas to leap from joypad to keypad is motion capture, but is its natural home on your handset?

Spend a few minutes with Pro Session Golf and you’ll realise the answer’s obviously ‘yes’. It captures videos of your golf swing and compares them to professionals, helping you improve your abilities in real-time, and with a real frame of reference.

However, Pro Session is amongst the few apps that make proper use of motion technology. It’s more likely to pop up in the entertaimnent menu of your phone. See, until now motion capture’s mainly been used by game developers, who use captured animations to fuel the fluid movements of characters on-screen. That process usually takes place when a game’s being made, not played, but with a cameraphone at your disposal movements can now be captured and used to translate your movements into in-game actions.

Nintendo’s Face Training for its DS Lite console already captures facial expressions with a camera add-on and uses them to score points in-game. There’s little to stop the title being ported to cameraphones, and with new game technology like Nokia’s N-Gage bringing quality games to mobile phones, we’d expect to see it sooner rather than later.

But it’s not just your own movements that can control in-game activities. GestureTek already sell phones in Japan that use built-in cameras to sense movement of the phone itself. It means any handset can be used to control games with a flick of the wrist.

It’s all fiendishly clever, and due to pop up in European handsets this year. Will your next phone improve your golf swing? You bet. But it’ll also improve your smile and let your waggle a win from the latest platformer, with no extra kit required.

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