If you've played Nintendo's Wii, you've probably already realized how much fun it is to actually be in the game. The motion tracking controller gives you a connection inside the game that you just don't get with a standard hand-held controller.

But what's next? How about actually physically entering the game as a virtual character? Based on a cool new product I uncovered at last week's Game Developers Conference, that day may not be too far off.

What's a virtual character? If you ever watched TechTV, or its antecedent ZDTV, you may remember Dash and Tilde. These virtual hosts were the mascots of the channel, introducing shows, doing promos and providing a digitally enhanced human-like embodiment of the content. Prior to ZDTV, we had Dev Null, the virtual character populating our MSNBC joint-venture called The Site - and incidentally, voiced by Leo Laporte (and pictured above).

But these virtual characters were not cheap, nor easy to do. Each required a puppeteer and actor/talent to provide motion and speech, along with a full video crew to record, a producer to monitor, and a big space to produce the characters. The hardware itself was wickedly expensive, with a price-tag in the hundreds of thousands. Since our early pioneering efforts, virtual characters have become a bit players in the entertainment business. The much reviled Jar Jar Binks, from Star Wars, along with the creepily wooden characters in The Polar Express, almost single-handedly killed the medium. However, they are still used in some entertainment applications, and in gaming. I recently enjoyed watching a virtual-character version of Finding Nemo's laid-back turtle, Crush, during a recent visit to Disneyland.

But even if virtual characters never took off, the hardware required to create one has continued to advance. And that's what was on display at the Game Developers Conference. A company called Natural Point showed off its innovative virtual motion capture solution, which cuts the entire process down to one person, wearing a special suit, a small-sized room, and about five thousand dollars of hardware. The entire package won't be available until this summer, but I watched a very compelling demonstration of the product in action. It uses these special OptiTrack FLEX:C120 cameras, pictured here.

But even at $350 a camera, or $5,000 for the whole setup, it still has limited appeal. More game developers can use it to make more realistic games, but it's still a niche product. At least for a while. But after talking with the developers, they seemed confident that they could cut the whole thing down to about $500 in a few years. And that's when it gets interesting. Imagine having not just an extension of your arm, but your entire body, head and face mapped into a virtual character inside a game. Add in a 90 degree treadmill, and a wall-sized screen, and suddenly you're not just playing a game, you're in the game. Godzilla, Master Chef, Link, Frodo, Mario, you can actually be any of those characters. And imagine the potential for internet-based gaming, inside a massive virtual world like World of Warcraft or the new Lord of the Rings MMORPG.

Today the Nintendo Wii Controller provides the most compelling and futuristic game-experience today. And because it is so easy, almost anyone can use it. But five years from now, when Nintendo releases the Wii 1080, perhaps full-body game-immersion will become the next innovative breakthrough. And based on how much fun the Wii controller provides, it seems a logical extension.