Back on to 3d already? The AI bubble hasn't even popped yet.
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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Why.
They had this at CES. But the online footage doesn't really capture it very well so I have no idea how good the product is.
If it's pulled off where I suppose it could be useful but it just sort of seems gimmicky to me. Remember 3D TVs, remember how there was absolutely no content for them and no one bought them. Yeah.
There are plenty of 3D movies still being released on Bluray. And 3D is still a thing in home-theatre projectors. The content is definitely there. And the tech has gotten better aswell. It just never caught on. Because people would rather have 8k on a 30 inch TV.
Woah is that a 3d picture
this was working well in a research lab in the aughts. Surprised its not more common as by now I would think any laptop camera should be able to do eye tracking pretty decently.
If a 3DS was able to pull this off flawlessly I'm pretty sure any potato laptop or phone can as well.
The challenge is the display and the software. There is no real contemporary stereoscopy support anymore beyond dedicated VR apps. Nvidia's driver level support has been deprecated, I believe.
that is sad to hear. when it was coming in I just assumed it would be something eventually all cards had as standard.
If a 3DS was able to pull this off flawlessly
It couldn't...it was highly dependent on viewing angle, both horizontal and vertical, it was really finicky to play 3D games without the 3D illusion dropping because you didn't hold the device in the exactly correct position/angle. On top of that, the 3D looked weird like those old holographic 3D stickers you'd get in breakfast cereal and such. It was a fun gimmick, but it really didn't work all that well.
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.
Was it your first Nintendo handheld, then?
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.
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
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).
The only thing I've seen mentioned is the bad stability of the stereoscopy and the narrow angle of the original model, which was solved with the same eye tracking solution we see here.
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.
While we're at it, the 3DS sold 75 million units.
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 give 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.
Firstly the 3DS couldn't pull it off. Secondly this is a completely different technology. Basically it's just tracking your eyes and Parallax mapping the screen effects.
It's still a 2D display in reality.
Yeah, no, the 3DS did eye tracking starting with the New 3DS.
Have people memory holed this? The New 3DS could adjust its parallax via eye tracking to a much wider effective tracking angle. It took a fraction of a second to adjust if you moved too quickly, but it was seamsless most of the time.
Have people memory holed this?
I have no idea what you mean. I've never heard of a new 3DS when did it come out?
- It had a bigger screen, eye tracking for the stereo 3D, a built-in second stick nub thingy and a bit more performance. It came in two sizes, to match the OG and XL versions of the base model.
Kinda nuts that this fell through the cracks for some people. The improvements to the stereo tracking were dramatic.
im not sure how the 3ds did it but if this is what I think the screen will still require physical lines to work off of that will be so thing that they should barely be visible or assuming its done better two screens on top of each other where the first screen throws up the lines and could likely be something like eink.
This will go nowhere.