Will people fall for 3D televisions in their homes the way they’ve fallen for Avatar? Maybe not. I certainly can’t imagine buying another $600+ TV so soon after taking the HD plunge. But a cheaper, palm-sized approach to 3D might placate the mainstream, and that just might be what Nintendo is planning.
Hours ago, Nintendo’s Japanese office put out a bizarrely ho-hum announcement via PDF for something that sounds ridiculously revolutionary: a successor to the portable Nintendo DS, titled the Nintendo 3DS (see what they did there?), that promises “games with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.” Wha? Even James Cameron hasn’t pulled that off. Nintendo has also declared a release window between now and March 2011, which confirms that there may have been some truth to my patent sniffing from a few weeks ago after all.
After reading such a vague press release, I’m dying to know how they’ll pull it off. Will the portable system have a radical new screen technology to simulate 3D distances? Or, as games site Kotaku speculates, will it use a camera and iPhone-esque gyroscope to sense how you hold the system? (Click here to watch a Nintendo DSi game which already does this… it’s trippy!) Nintendo says they’ll tell more this July at Los Angeles’ Electronics Entertainment Expo.
