Sunday, April 4, 2010

Nintendo: 3DS in 2011

Nintendo to launch 3DS in 2011.

The 3DS will display games in 3D without the use of special glasses. According to that .pdf file, it will be backwards compatible.

So, it's like a this:


Which they can do via this:


Which will result in this:
$

7 comments:

_J_ said...

Really? No one has thoughts on a 3D DS which does not require glasses to present games in 3D?

really?

Andrew said...

I am convinced it is all an elaborate lie.

MA17 said...

The video is a bit misleading, I think, since it is showing head tracking as a substitute for mouselook. It's still 3D rendered in 2D otherwise.

Autostereoscopy (3D with different images to each eye without needing glasses) is pretty cool. Limited, though, to zones where the effect works. Not a big problem with a handheld where it is pretty easy to control the distance between viewer and screen and there aren't usually any pesky other people to worry about.

It's probably going to have more of an impact than the camera did for the DSi but it's hard to have great expectations for stereoscopic 3D of any kind on a system that generally does shitty 3D rendering in 2D.

Unknown said...

I think 3D is terribly over rated in all aspects. Show me a worthwhile use case and I might change my mind.

MA17 said...

I'd argue that video games are exactly where 3D belongs. Finally put back that depth perception they took away when they squeezed three dimensions into two.

And really, it makes the most sense to try this out on a handheld since its the only kind of system that can control the kind of screen the player is using. nvidia has that such and so forth going on with the PC and the glasses, but man, 3D on the PC strikes me as a niche of a niche.

_J_ said...

I think I agree with Kyle, to a degree.

3D in video games, I assume, is akin to motion control in video games. There are some times when motion control is useful and fulfills a need. There are other times when motion control is simply a needless replacing of "press a" with "shake stick".

Something like pokemon, as it occurs today, does not need 3D added to the gameplay; it may make the game prettier, but it does not add anything to the gameplay.

Something like a first person shooter, or a tactical strategy rpg (i'm thinking final fantasy tactics / disgaea) which utilized a 3D grid system? That could possibly benefit from enhanced 3D graphics.

I guess the question is...what would the sort of 3D imaging utilized on a 3DS add to gaming which cannot be far more simply done in 2D with shading / sizing?


I mean, it would be kind of cool if they made a 3D mario game, a la mario galaxy, wherein mario's running towards or away from the camera actually "looked" 3D...but I do not know what that would actually add to the gameplay over the 2D representation of 3D we have now.

My initial excitement was for the technology, rather than the use of the technology. Cause the first time I watched that video and the DS was tilted? That was pretty fucking awesome.

MA17 said...

The nvidia demos were showing such as Tomb Raider: Underground, which is enough about interacting with an environment where depth perception can seriously mean the difference between success and failure that it is self-evident that the technology is creating a good.

A 3D Mario game, or any other platformer would similarly benefit from this kind of system. As one who has jumped off a cliff into a bottomless pit that, arguably, would not have happened in a world with perception of depth, I approve of this without exception.

No question that there are myriad games where depth perception would make almost no difference but there are certainly existing games that could benefit from this and I don't doubt that developers could find a way to take advantage of it in unexpected ways.