14 DAY TRIAL // Clearly the big news coming out from this year's E3 trade show was that the Nintendo 3DS is not only real but manages to deliver a full three-dimensional gaming experience without using any glasses.
Most publishers are preparing videogames linked to the new device set to arrive in late 2010 or in early 2011 for an unspecified price. And it seems that Nintendo is already thinking about taking the focus on 3D to heart when putting together the successor to the Nintendo Wii home console.
Talking to the Nihon Kizai Shimbun newspaper, Satoru Iwata, who is the president of Nintendo, said, “If you display a 3D image, the image quality becomes extremely bad, so we'd probably do it with the next system. We're thinking that the timing should be once the 3D television adoption rate crosses the 30% mark. We're looking at the adoption trends.”
It's not clear whether the no glasses system used in the Nintendo 3DS can also be employed in a home console. Iwata had previously talked about how glasses would not be popular with the crowd looking to play videogames at home so the company must be interested in creating a system more attractive to the average gamer than the 3D glasses concept now pushed by Sony, whose PlayStation 3 is going three dimensional as soon as possible.
After all, Nintendo managed to make motion tracking simple and accessible with the Wii and both Microsoft and Sony are only now catching up with the PlayStation Move and Kinect. If the next Nintendo home console succeeds in making 3D gaming as simple, then it will capture the market and again relegate the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 to second and third place in the console hierarchy. An announcement on a new home gaming device will probably only come once the 3DS handheld is out.