Tweet
3-D Without Glasses? Try the New Nintendo Handheld Game
By SETH SCHIESEL
LOS ANGELES — There aren’t many moments when you feel you are holding the future in your hands.
Without overstating the case, I just experienced one of those epiphanies with a prototype of the new Nintendo 3DS handheld game machine following the company’s media briefing here on Tuesday at the annual E3 video game convention.
The 3DS delivers on a simple concept that has eluded pureyors of mainstream entertainment for decades: real 3-D visuals that don’t require special glasses. Promises are one thing, but the 3DS actually works. Holding the portable unit in your hands, you can perceive depth and rotate a virtual camera around objects in way that feels almost surreal. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo, Nintendo provided brief demonstrations of games including a version of Metal Gear Solid from Konami, as well as 3-D images on-screen of classic Nintendo characters including Mario and Donkey Kong. The system is also able to take 3-D pictures using two cameras on its face.
One technical caveat: you have to look at the screen straight on in order for the 3-D effects to appear.
From an angle — say someone else is holding the device and you are trying to see the picture from the side — the image appears distorted, if not a bit disorienting. Nintendo did not offer any detailed technical explanation of the system, but my understanding, based on private conversations with industry executives who are developing games for the system, is that that the necessity of viewing the screen straight on is why similar technology has not worked on televisions.
As one executive said, making a similar technology work on television would require a family or other group of viewers to sit in a column perfectly perpendicular to the screen, rather than in a row, as on a couch.
The 3DS, by contrast, works because it is held by one person only a few inches from the eyeballs. The images on the 3DS do not pop off the screen and come out at you. Rather they recede deeper into the image, providing depth.
The big theme so far at this year’s E3 is the provision of new ways of perceiving, consuming and controlling interactive entertainment. Microsoft began with Kinect, its new controller-less technology for the Xbox 360, which is scheduled to be released on Nov. 4.
Nintendo did not announce a release date for the 3DS, but industry executives said they expected the company to begin selling the new product in Japan this fall and in the United States next spring.
By SETH SCHIESEL
LOS ANGELES — There aren’t many moments when you feel you are holding the future in your hands.
Without overstating the case, I just experienced one of those epiphanies with a prototype of the new Nintendo 3DS handheld game machine following the company’s media briefing here on Tuesday at the annual E3 video game convention.
The 3DS delivers on a simple concept that has eluded pureyors of mainstream entertainment for decades: real 3-D visuals that don’t require special glasses. Promises are one thing, but the 3DS actually works. Holding the portable unit in your hands, you can perceive depth and rotate a virtual camera around objects in way that feels almost surreal. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo, Nintendo provided brief demonstrations of games including a version of Metal Gear Solid from Konami, as well as 3-D images on-screen of classic Nintendo characters including Mario and Donkey Kong. The system is also able to take 3-D pictures using two cameras on its face.
One technical caveat: you have to look at the screen straight on in order for the 3-D effects to appear.
From an angle — say someone else is holding the device and you are trying to see the picture from the side — the image appears distorted, if not a bit disorienting. Nintendo did not offer any detailed technical explanation of the system, but my understanding, based on private conversations with industry executives who are developing games for the system, is that that the necessity of viewing the screen straight on is why similar technology has not worked on televisions.
As one executive said, making a similar technology work on television would require a family or other group of viewers to sit in a column perfectly perpendicular to the screen, rather than in a row, as on a couch.
The 3DS, by contrast, works because it is held by one person only a few inches from the eyeballs. The images on the 3DS do not pop off the screen and come out at you. Rather they recede deeper into the image, providing depth.
The big theme so far at this year’s E3 is the provision of new ways of perceiving, consuming and controlling interactive entertainment. Microsoft began with Kinect, its new controller-less technology for the Xbox 360, which is scheduled to be released on Nov. 4.
Nintendo did not announce a release date for the 3DS, but industry executives said they expected the company to begin selling the new product in Japan this fall and in the United States next spring.
Comment