Earlier this week, as if in response to the iPhone’s incredible gains on the handheld gaming market, Nintendo announced the successor to their popular DS console, the 3DS. The main difference over their earlier, dual screen device? 3D without glasses.
The problem with this approach is that the Nintendo DS’ screens are too small for true, pop-out-of-the-display 3D to really work… and it also raises some big questions about touchscreen gaming.
Over at Kotaku, Deputy Editor Steven Totilo has an interesting theory on how Nintendo is going to do 3D gaming without 3D displays: they’ll borrow a trick from the book of App Store developers like Ngmoco and fake the 3D by using the accelerometer.
Consider Ngmoco’s WordFu, which uses the tilt registered by the iPhone’s accelerometer to adjust the viewing angle of the models on the display. This allows you to tilt your iPhone from side to side and see WordFu’s tiles as if they were real 3D objects. This is a quick, easy way to simulate 3D without a special display, and it works just fine with touchscreen games.
The only problem is: Nintendo’s DSi console can do this already by using the device’s built-in camera. More importantly, this approach to 3D gaming is more of a software trick to leave up to developers than a hardware improvement that would justify launching a next-gen handheld gaming console for.
Either this theory’s wrong, Nintendo’s bereft of ideas on how to make the DS better or they’ve got a lot more to show us. I guess we’ll see at E3.
