Nintendo's New 3-D Portable Is 19th Century Tech On Steroids
Posted by Joshua_Kopstein on Tuesday, Jun 15, 2010
2010 is a strange and wonderful year for videogames. After years of innovative stagnation catering to a money-printing casual market, Nintendo, who made waves in 2006 with the motion-controlled Wii, is once again running the show this week at the E3 games expo in Los Angeles. Their new portable system, the Nintendo 3DS, is offering portable 3-D gaming with no glasses required. It might seem like magic, but it’s still based on one of the oldest tricks in the book — Stereoscopy.
Invented in 1838 by Sir Charles Wheatstone, stereoscopy is the earliest form of 3-D imaging. The process creates the illusion of depth through the disparity in perception between the human retinas. The most common form is anagyph imagery, the dual-color kind we’re used to seeing through 3-D glasses.
But the 3DS takes a slightly different approach — Instead of relying solely on the human eyes to create the illusion of depth, the device uses a network of 3 motion-tracking cameras, two in the back and one in the front, to create images that literally look like they’re popping out from the screen. It can even take 3-D photos using this same process.
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But of course, we saw it coming. It all started in 2007 when computer scientist Johnny Chung Lee wow’ed us with his extremely simple head-tracking experiment that used nothing but a Wii Remote and custom software. Then, back in February of this year, some footage of Japanese Nintendo DSi software showed off motion-tracking technology similar to the kind we’re now seeing in the Nintendo 3DS.
Nintendo said in their press conference this morning that the nature of the 3DS technology makes it impossible to show in a live video demonstration. But by looking at the above examples of what got us here, those not at E3 this week should have a pretty clear idea of the wondrous world that portable gaming is about to enter.
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