During Superbowl XLIII, EA Tiburon Lead Designer Ian Cummings revealed some of the first details for Madden 10, unveiling a new technology called "procedural awareness."
"What is it? We’ll you’ve likely heard of ‘head tracking’ with IK. If you haven’t, it’s a way to turn the players head around to face a target dynamically, without the need for canned animations," said Cummings.
To give a quick demonstration of what that means, Cummings provided a few short tech demos.
In addition to head tracking, the new technology allows players to blink and adjust their spine and shoulder placement to follow their head movement. In the tech demo below, you can see how this works with NBA Live player model Dwayne Wade.
Lastly, the new PA (procedural awareness) system allows players to show what Cummings calls "procedural attitudes" which are dynamic facial animations that adjust to specific events happening during the game. Some of these facial emotions include confident, nervous, and intense.