While at E3, we spoke to president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida for an interview you can read in full in our latest issue, regarding Sony's evolution of its standard controller's motion sensing, what 3D can bring to gaming and the lack of PSP support.

Yoshida is candid when it comes to Sony's handling of the PS3 and PSP, admitting that it could have been more even-handed. "To be honest, a couple of years ago, working on launch titles for PS3, we shifted focus too much away from PSP," he admits. "After the launch of PSP, because PS3 was coming, for the first year we didn’t have enough PSP support. So, two years ago, we quickly moved some support back – that’s why we had a better line-up last year and this year. So balancing support is a very important job."

Interestingly, despite Sony Computer Entertainment chief Kaz Hirai asserting that PS3 will do for 3D in the living room what it did for for Blu-ray, Yoshida avoids positioning the 3D version of any game as the definitive one. "We’re not necessarily saying that Killzone 3 in 3D is the best way, more that it’s just taking advantage of the technology... It’s a great experience that we believe in for the long term," he explains, before concuring with 3DS producer Hideki Konno's thoughts on the benefits of 3D. "It allows games to show more depth – it clarifies which characters are in the background, and in a racing game it’s easier to judge distances at corners, for example."

"Of course, we understand that TVs aren’t cheap," he continues. "And that people have long cycles before changing – some may use a TV for five years, others for ten years. We’re not forcing people to buy a 3DTV now, but TV companies are making efforts – companies are announcing that in future most of them will be adopting 3D functionality as standard."

In developing 3D titles, Sony's internal teams have been working much more closely together - something that Sony President Howard Stringer has tried to encourage. "Sony is one of those large companies with lots of different groups doing their own things, but 3D is one thing that really unites different parts of the company." Yoshida explains. "3DTV has allowed us to talk directly to people like the Sony Pictures guys working on 3D movies or the broadcast people who have worked on creating 3D content for broadcast. That really helped us because we were late in adopting 3D tech compared to the film industry; having access to those internal people helped us to get up and running quickly." Yoshida's team were also able to help Sony's TV arm improve its R&D for the sets, providing games to test on them.

Despite the complexities of a device which tracks movement in 3D space, Yoshida says that it's easy to develop for: "Because Move has three separate sensors in it – and also the camera tracks the sphere on the controller – receiving raw data from all the sensors presents a very complex mathematical issue that a team has to solve," he elaborates. "That’s where [our] libraries come in – they combine all of the sensor readings and provide the exact data format that programmers need, along with options on how to use the data. To incorporate Move functionality into a game – even existing games like Resident Evil 5, or a game that was close to being finished on the technical side, like SOCOM 4 – is very straightforward to do."

Yoshida has found that those same developers' previous experience programming for the Wii has proved a boon, though. "When [developers] started making a Wii game they had a list of ten different things they wanted to achieve but found that only two or three things were possible due to the limitations of the technology." He explains. "So those teams already have ideas that they wanted to incorporate, and now they can do those things with Move. These people have prototyped things on Wii, and some of their ideas that didn’t work out can be tried again on Move. I’m sure it’ll be good to incorporate some of the concepts that couldn’t be realised before."

You can read the full interview in E217, out in newsagents tomorrow.