Everyone wants to be the next Wii.

Nintendo’s innovation has rippled through the industry, sending engineers back to the drawing board. Both Microsoft and Sony are said to be working on motion controllers.

GoLive2is taking a different approach with their motion controller, dubbed Stix. It doesn’t attach to a pre-exciting console; it attaches to the PC already in your home. They want to develop a completely free web portal full of motion-compatible games.

They just might be on the right track.

The influences of the Wiimote are apparent on the Stix design. The location of the battery hatch, placement of the trigger button and the front-loaded sensor are nearly note-for-note riffs on Nintendo’s design. What’s different are the face buttons; none are actual buttons. It’s all a touch screen. Buttons mapped onto this touch screen — up, down, left, right, A, X and O.

There will be two Stix controllers at launch, the 200 ($39.99) and the 400 ($49.99) models. The 200 is designed for 2D gaming, while the 400 will support fully 3D games, too. For example, while it sounds unwieldy, we were told you could load “World of Warcraft” and map 16 buttons across the two controllers.

The real potential in the Stix controller isn’t in the controller’s mapping onto complex 3D action games like “Crysis,” though, but to add intuitive motion controls to the breadth of freely available 2D and 3D games already the web. GoLive2 will launch a free, ad-supported web portal. Technically, the site is already live, but the controllers won’t arrive until August.

In addition to the games that GoLive2 gets onto the web portal, users will be free to map motion controls to any game available on the web. Those controller configurations will be submitted to GoLive2’s moderators, who test the profiles and collect the best ones. The configurations will be added to the portal’s search engine. GoLive2 claims their search engine will be updated constantly with new, user-discovered games and controller profiles.

Though users have done extraordinary things playing around with Nintendo’s Wiimote already, the hardware wasn’t designed for that kind of manipulation – GoLive2’s is. The company wants to encourage homebrew communities to embrace their motion controller. Whether the technology is as nuanced as the Wiimote’s remains to be seen; the two games we played were touchy, but we didn’t have much time with them.

The potential is certainly there; we’re excited to see where it goes.

Stix 200 and 400 models will be sold at Target, Costco and Amazon.com in August.