Augmented reality and 3D gaming are among the major themes at this year's Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco. Just wandering around the hundreds of games on show on the exhibition floor today, I couldn't help but think the line between "real life" and gaming is becoming seriously blurred.

Motion control has already been a big star, with the unveiling of the PlayStation Move controller last night building on the Wii's efforts to change gaming from a sit-down experience into a more active and physically involved one. That crazy looking Parrot AR Drone quadricopter that was first introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year was zipping around as well. Wannabe pilots control it using an iPhones linked via Wi-Fi to the chopper and the two cameras mounted on it and they can even play augmented reality games that make real life objects into targets you can shoot, on-screen, using a button on the iPhone.

As for 3D gaming, it has to be seen to be believed. From racers to sports games, it has a lot of potential to seriously soup up a gaming session and make it far more immersive. Unfortunately 3D glasses and an expensive 3D TV will be required but the richness of the experience makes it worth donning the dorky eyewear (and unlike 3D movies, you don't have to wear them in public).

The more serious side of the show takes place in the lecture sessions, where industry legends provide advice to the thousands of developers in attendance on everything from improving their games' graphics and audio to marketing their new products.

In two of the more interesting lectures today, EA Sports developers Joseph Harmon and Jayeson Lee-
Steere and Sony developer Ben Diamand discussed the importance of producing realistic shadows in Madden NFL 10 (EA Sports) and God of War III (Sony). Producing accurate shadows and lighting was vital to creating the graphically rich environments modern gamers desired, but rendering them at high frame rates in both of the games placed a lot of demand on hardware and memory, they said. That meant that if they were using current technology, developers had to either trade-off graphics in other areas of a game or create new programming code that was less resource intensive.

Another interesting session came from game audio legend Akira Yamaoka - the man behind the audio in Konami's Silent Hill series. He pushed for developers to make more effort composing and implementing the audio in their games. "It's sound that directly touches people's emotions," he said.

Interestingly, he also said game developers should make more effort to engage gamers' emotional sides through non-audio tools as well. Specifically, developers should regularly foreshadow upcoming events in the plot, much like the best novel writers do, and make people turn right regularly in horror games to create a sense of unease. According to Yamaoka, turning right repeatedly causes a person to become uneasy, while turning left is more natural. Sounds farfetched to me, but he even reckons that's why horses are usually made to run around a racing track anti-clockwise, always turning left, instead of running clockwise!

My game of the day - Power Gig

Guitar Hero may be a lot of fun but it won't exactly teach you how to play a guitar. Power Gig: Rise of the SixString, on the other hand, looks to be pioneering what every musically inclined gamer has wished for - the ability to use a real electric guitar as the controller. Seven45 Studios has one of the hippest stands I've seen at the GDC and was showing off the new title.

It won't be available on PC, but PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 gamers will be able to unleash their inner rocker using a 'SixString' guitar controller that is essentially a real six string guitar that can interface with their console. The guitar can also be plugged into a standard amp and used normally.

According to Seven45 Studios the game has two overarching modes - beat matching and chord play. Beat matching is similar to the gameplay in other band games like Guitar Hero, and requires gamers to strum specific strings in time with the on-screen instructions. Chord play is slightly more complex, requiring the gamer to place their fingers correctly on the strings to play specific chords and songs accurately.

Seven45 Studios is partly owned by musical instrument manufacturer First Act. Power Gig is due out in the final quarter of this year.