this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
56 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
63614 readers
4570 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As I said below I'm shocked to find out that people have forgotten that Nintendo iterated on the launch design with camera-driven eye tracking that pretty much solved that issue entirely.
Did people not mess around with the New 3DS at all? In my recollection it feels like it dominated most of the system's lifespan. But then in my recollection I never ever turned off the 3D slider while the Internet is full of people that claim they never turned it up, so it seems the 3DS was used in very different ways by different people.
I'd guess many people never used a New 3DS. I got the original, was disappointed, and never thought about buying a new expensive one to fix the shortcomings of the old one.
Was it your first Nintendo handheld, then? Because man, is that their default play. I say, sitting on my pile of Game Boy Light, Game Boy Advance SP, Nintendo DSi, New Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Switch OLED Editions.
But seriously, it works very well, it feels like magic and the bigger screen is also pretty good for how old and low-res it is. I have one sitting on my bedside table right now. If anything would sell me on a laptop using the same tech is the New 3DS.
I just don't know that the PC ecosystem would have the software support for it.
No, but it was my last
Man, for a thing that sold 75 million units and ended up with a pretty great game library some people really latched on to being mad about it at launch and just never moved past that.
It may well be the console with the biggest gap between performance and performative negative opinion online ever. I would have said neck and neck with the PSP a few years ago, but it really feels like that got reassessed after the fact through emulation.
I'm not mad, I was simply disappointed enough by the original 3DS that I didn't want to spend more money on a different version of it.
Is it somehow important to you that people like it?
Not particularly, but if we're discussing the idea of bringing this display technology back I do have a vested interest in knee-jerk rejection of its use on the 3DS not misrepresenting the potential.
This is the absolute best way to do stereo 3D, at least for single user devices, it works and it's built on well understood technology. I get that people were mad at the OG 3DS, mostly as part of a bit of a mob mentality memetic rejection of 3D TVs, but this is genuinely cool tech I would like to have access to again.
Me too, man, I miss the 3DS era. I need to go back and replay A Link Between Worlds, at least.
Man, yeah. Mario 3D World, the Sega M2 3D conversions of retro games...
I don't think the native PC software support would be there for something like this, but at least having a viable way to properly emulate the 3DS without having to rig something with a VR headset would be great.
Not sure why you're bringing this up in a discussion where multiple people have given other reasons for "being mad" (or, more objectively, disliking) the OG 3DS.
You're acting in pretty bad faith.
The only thing I've seen mentioned is the bad stability of the stereoscopy and the narrow viewing angle of the original model, which was solved with the same eye tracking solution we see here. The entire conversation is spawning from my surprise at people seemingly being unaware that happened or assuming it hadn't worked.
There was legitimate criticism at launch about the initial library, but obviously we're not arguing about that here (and it definitely got corrected over time).
Yes, and I've explained to you that many people probably never tried the fixed version. So why say "people are just repeating what they're heard about 3D TVs"? You're attributing an infantilizing explanation to all those who disagree, when a more logical and direct explanation was already given.
Was it?
Look, you seem very keen on having an argument about this, but this conversation so far boils down to:
-3DS did this well. -No, it didn't. -Oh, I meant the New 3DS that made it better. I didn't realize people didn't know about that one. -People probably didn't know about that one.
While we're at it, the 3DS sold 75 million units. There are probably way more people out there who tested a New 3DS than a Dreamcast.
EDIT: Made me check. 10 million units, as per Wikipedia. I would have guessed higher, but hey, I was still right, it's more than the Dreamcast.
I'd be fine if you didn't tell people they only dislike the 3DS because they are repeating what others are saying about 3D TVs.
Nintendo 3DS: 25.96 million
Nintendo 3DS XL: 19.64 million
Nintendo 2DS: 10.29 million
New Nintendo 3DS XL: 12.25 million
New Nintendo 3DS: 2.49 million
New Nintendo 2DS XL: 4.41 million
These are the sales numbers I was able to quickly find. Roughly 15 million "New 3DS (XL)" vs 75 million total devices, or ~60 million 3D devices. So for every person that tried a New 3DS, 3 people only tried the old one.
And you're surprised, even "shocked", that most people still think about the old 3DS when talking about the 3DS 3D effect? Shocked enough to attribute it to people just repeating what other people said about 3D TVs?
The 3D display on the 3DS was absolutely treated way more harshly than it deserved because it landed smack in the middle of the hipstery meme of claiming 3D cinemas were a scam and 3D TVs sucked. Both of those things had different degrees of grains of truth at the core, but none of them really applied to the 3DS.
If that's your hangup, I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree, because I WILL hold to that. It happened and it was absolutely the children who were wrong. You know because they weren't even done being unreasonably mad at 3D displays for sheer mob dopamine when they started getting hyped about putting the same 3D displays on their face, which had most of the same issues plus made everybody puke in the crappy early iterations. I've kept a mental naughty list of all the games journalists that were super snarky about 3D monitors and the 3DS but immediately fawned over Palmer Luckey because, man, did that bit of flip-flopping not age well.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there, because the point I've been making all along is that I am surprised at people not realizing that the New 3DS fixed the shortcomings of the original when it came to stability and viewing angles. For the umpteenth time.
I also sniped your googling, but hey, the count you found gives it a few extra million over the one I found, so that's neat. Again, that puts it ahead of the Dreamcast, the Game Gear and the Saturn and just behind the PS Vita in terms of units moved. I think you'd be surprised if somebody showed up not realizing that one of those existed. That seems reasonable. More relevantly to the point, you don't need to have owned one to be aware of this. Not only were these on display kiosks all over the planet (because 3D was and remains hard to market otherwise), but this was the big selling point. It was all over reviews of the new models.
And again, I'm not saying people do remember and are lying, I'm surprised at the fact that they don't remember. Or at least that they don't remember so hard they're willing to be confidently wrong about it online. Which seems both reasonable and entirely up to me, to be honest.
I only had the new 3DS, used it for many years. I messed around with the 3D functionality from time to time during these years but it was never good and never got rid of the two things I described.
Oh, now you are objectively incorrect.
I pulled mine out on the back of this thread (not hard, I have it on hand), just to reassure myself of how effective the eye tracking is. A level of Yoshi's Wooly world later, I can say it only lost tracking when I started pacing around with it. While sitting or standing with it in my hands it was just a clean, solid 3D image, and it definitely beats having some polarized or shutter glasses on my face.