Our friends over at The Dreamcast Junkyard were lucky enough to speak with former Sega peripheral development manager Kenji Tosaki recently, and he mentioned that the company had very early ideas about creating a motion-sensing controller that would have pre-dated the Wii by over a decade.
When asked if there was a peripheral he would have liked to have created for the Dreamcast, Tosaki replied that he wanted to make a light gun controller that would work via image recognition, so it could be used with LCD televisions.
He then adds:
We never came up with any kind of actual plans for this, but I would've wanted to release an updated controller with an image-recognition light gun, gyro sensor, and vibration built in. The light gun functionality would have doubled as a pointing device, just like the Nintendo Wii Remote. And with the gyro sensor, you would have been able to control games by tilting or shaking the controller.
Rather than getting games noticed through advanced graphics, the idea was to focus on more interesting play styles. In concept, it was pretty close to the Wii Remote. We wanted to leverage the peripherals to make more interesting games. But, I'm not sure the technology was there yet. Everyone probably would've said we were about 10 years ahead of the curve.
Tosaki also reveals that he was working on a VR headset for the Saturn:
I also spent about seven years looking into VR in the SEGA Saturn era. I would've liked to have put something out that used VR, but at the time I could see how limited we were with it, so looking back I'm glad I didn't push it.
Sega had previously worked on a headset for the Mega Drive / Genesis which never made it to market – that particular venture was developed by Sega of America, so it seems likely that the headset Tosaki refers to is a totally different project.
You can read the full interview here.