Nintendo's magical new 3D toy

BABBAGE had a chance to play with the new Nintendo 3DS games console yesterday, a hand-held device with a 3D display that does not require the user to wear glasses. Yes, really. The 3DS can perform this 'autostereoscopic' miracle because it can be pretty sure where the screen is relative to your head: it will be about 30 centimetres in front of your face, and your nose will be aligned with the screen's centre. Using a filter called a parallax barrier, the display can then direct two slightly different images, in different directions, towards your left and right eyes to create the 3D effect. There's quite a lot of wiggle room: you have to move the device quite far away, or move quite far off the central axis, before the 3D effect is lost.

It is hard to describe how impressive this is; it just works. You turn on the device and the menus and logos pop out of the screen in bright, vivid 3D. Apple likes to talk about the iPad as a magical product, and there are very few other companies capable of devising gadgets that feel as though they have appeared from the future; but Nintendo has pulled it off with the 3DS. A slider on the side of the screen lets you control the depth of the 3D effect, and even turn it off altogether, which reduces the image to high-resolution 2D. Setting the 3D effect to about half-way seemed to be easiest on the eye. Nintendo advises 3DS users to take a ten-minute break every 30 minutes, which is probably not a bad idea, but its warning is likely to be widely ignored.

There were only a couple of games to try out, notably 'Super Street Fighter IV 3D', a beat-'em-up title, and 'Face Raiders', a bizarre augmented-reality game that captures faces using the 3DS's built-in camera and then turns them into flying baddies you have to shoot while waving the console around. The 3D effect makes it much easier to distinguish foreground action from background scenery, and should make platform games easier. (There is considerable excitement in this Babbage's household about the 3D remake of 'The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time', an old Nintendo classic that has been updated for the 3DS.)

As with Nintendo's previous handhelds, the 3DS is backwards-compatible with existing games, though they will obviously only work in 2D. But millions of children will want to upgrade, which should help Nintendo fend off a growing challenge in portable gaming from Apple's iPhone and iPod touch devices. (Accordingly, I would not be surprised to see a 3D screen on the iPhone 6, due in 2012, if 3DS sales are strong.)

But will the 3DS have an impact beyond gaming? Given the popularity of its portable consoles, Nintendo is likely to sell tens of millions of 3DS devices in the next few years (the 3DS will go on sale in February in Japan, and in March elsewhere). It could, in other words, be the device that takes 3D technology, which is still a minority sport despite the best efforts of television manufacturers everywhere, into the consumer mainstream. The 3DS has a built-in 3D camera, too, and will be able to show 3D video content supplied on plug-in cartridges, or streamed over a wireless connection. It makes today's 3D TVs, with their various kinds of glasses, seem clunky.

The problem is that the autostereoscopic effect is relatively easy to pull off with a handheld device being used by one person; the same technology is much harder to apply to TVs. There are various ways to make 3D TVs that do not require glasses, but they require viewers to sit in certain positions, or rely on 'head tracking' to work out where viewers are and steer images to them accordingly. Autostereoscopic TVs are, in other words, still some way off. If consumers impressed by the 3DS then clamour for TVs that can also perform its glasses-free magic, they may decide to skip today's 3D TVs and wait for autostereoscopic models to arrive, probably after 2015. The 3DS may thus have the curious effect of boosting demand for 3D TVs in the long term, but depressing it in the short term.