In the final part of TG Daily's interview with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, the creator of Unreal shared his thoughts on Nintendo's Wii and he also revealed that Unreal Engine 4.0 will actually be designed more around consoles than the PC.

Regarding the Wii, Sweeney commented, "I still think that motion controllers, such as the Wii controller, have a limited purpose, sort of a gimmicky thing. Standing there and holding a bunch of devices and moving them around wildly is great for party games, but I don't think that will fundamentally change the way people interact with computers. Humans are tactile beings, so things such as touchscreens fundamentally improve the user interface."

With touchscreens in mind, he said that he's impressed by the iPhone interface, but in terms of computer interaction and video games Sweeney believes one of the next big areas is camera controlled interaction (similar to Sony's EyeToy or the newer PlayStation Eye). "The other big direction is head tracing - cameras built into consoles. They watch you and detect, for example, your arm movement. It is just more natural, because it is somewhat annoying to hold a bunch of wired plastic [doodads], wireless things you have to pick up and recharge them every once in a while. To me, it's more compelling to just use free-form movement and have computers recognize your gestures," he said.

Sweeney, who previously talked about the decline of PC gaming, then dropped a bit of a bombshell regarding the next iteration of Epic's popular Unreal Engine middleware: "Version 4 will exclusively target the next console generation, Microsoft's successor for the Xbox 360, Sony's successor for the Playstation 3 - and if Nintendo ships a machine with similar hardware specs, then that also. PCs will follow after that."

"The Unreal engine is really tied to a console cycle," he said. "We will continue to improve Unreal Engine 3 and add significant new features through the end of this console cycle. So, it is normal to expect that we will add new stuff in 2011 and 2012. We're shipping Gears of War now; we're just showing the next bunch of major tech upgrades such as soft-body physics, destructible environments and crowds. There is a long life ahead for Unreal Engine 3."