In 2006, Nintendo popularised the idea of motion-controlled gaming, bringing it into the home with the Wii. In 2007, Apple made the idea of a touchscreen for mobile phones ubiquitous, which Nintendo now looks to drag into the living room with WiiU. Amidst rumours that Microsoft's next Xbox home console will be tablet-based, and with the Playstation Vita embracing touch for its handheld as well, it bears looking at what kinds of changes a new generation might bring.

While going hands-on with the WiiU at last year's E3, I actually took very little from the touch sensitive nature of the new controller, and was instead enamored by the interconnectivity it promised. One player with their own screen and four others sharing a television allowed for frenetic and engaging multiplayer games which catered for one player being overpowered or outnumbered.

The touchscreen itself brought the novelty of being able to harness quick, small flicks (as opposed to the larger gestures of the Wiimote and nunchuck) and see large-scale results. This specificity of gesture and the intimate property of the handheld controller flies in the face of the overbearing movements necessary to make Microsoft's Kinect recognise a player input, which hampered Kinect Adventures and other titles which required quick response times, favouring instead the myriad of exercise and dance titles which grace the platform instead.

Does the touchscreen interface combined with motion controls marry both worlds successfully? If the rumours about a tablet for the next Xbox are true, Kinect could work simultaneously with such a device to create new gameplay opportunities. The WiiU, however, has its motion controls still driven by separate physical controllers.

Consider the possibility of a game which utilised virtual-thumbstick controls on a medium-sized tablet while detecting head movements for camera controls and bodily movements to dodge. Or the use of the next generation of Kinect Voice Commands to interact in a more intensely personal manner with on-screen characters while consulting a virtual notepad in the palm of your hand so as not to spoil immersion.

The biggest reason thumbstick-based controllers still thrive was articulated nicely by Yahtzee Croshaw, who said that the instantaneous action/reaction dynamic of moving your thumb several millimeters to press a button as compared to the half a second it can take to make a full swipe of your arm simply doesn't compare.

When you need reaction times to be quick, the hierarchy of precision goes keyboard + mouse, dual-thumbstick controller, touchscreen, motion-control. In that order.

So with the big three potentially embracing the latter three forms of control for their home console devices, what we can expect more than anything else is divergence on the one hand of games which specialise in one specific control method, and convergence on the other of more innovative developers attempting to combine elements of various control methods to create the best experiences. Either way, the multiple inputs (as long as no one is bold enough to scrap an existing controller) bode well for gamers, with a sharply increased variety of experiences available on each new console.

Meanwhile, this tablet notion could just solve one of the most persistent dilemmas facing home console makers today: menu navigation. Neither a controller or motion-control device has the ability to quickly move from one part of the screen to another quickly and with ease, so the introduction of a touchscreen device, which is easily the next-best thing to a mouse, could be a nice generational step forward in terms of ease of use and navigating the vast array of new audio/visual/streaming services the consoles are offering.

At this point, however, only the WiiU is a relatively known quantity. There are rumours of varying strength concerning Microsoft's potential next console, and Sony still remains a wild card. One thing we can say for sure, is that the hardware will be designed to receive more incremental updates in the next generation through peripheral devices and software updates than ever before, so it'll be interesting to look at the basic layout of each new console and know that it'll serve merely as a springboard for a spectrum of changes in the years to come.

By Leigh Harris - Leigh is an Australian games industry veteran who's recently started writing about games, movies and more. Follow @Leigh748 on Twitter